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Flashlight

bySusan Choi

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**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

'A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence' Financial Times

The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned.

The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.

'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian

'A writer at the height of her spectacular powers' Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House

'Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity' Raven Leilani, author of Luster

'I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it' Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy

A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure. Like the flashlight of its title it cast an evasive, variably illuminating beam…. It surely cannot be overlooked by this year’s Booker judges

Financial Times

About Susan Choi

Susan Choi is the author of the novels Flashlight, Trust Exercise, My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman and The Foreign Student. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Flashlight began as a short story and received the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Susan Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Details
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • ISBN: 9781787335127
  • Length: 464 pages
  • Dimensions: 243mm x 40mm x 161mm
  • Weight: 696g
  • Price: £20.00
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