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Flashlight

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2026

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Flashlight

By: Susan Choi
Narrated by: Eunice Wong
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025

A moment is all it takes to shatter a family. The echoes last a lifetime...

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is missing: presumably drowned.

This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk's disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels.

‘Ferociously smart and full of surprises’ Eleanor Catton

‘A family epic… Engrossing’ Telegraph

‘Big, bold and surprising’ Guardian

‘Gorgeous... Almost impossibly heartbreaking’ New York Magazine

‘Illuminates the buried secrets of the human heart’ Oprah Daily
© Susan Choi 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 20th Century Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction United States World Literature Heartfelt Inspiring Tear-jerking Thought-Provoking Imperial Japan
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Critic reviews

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
Choi is one of contemporary literature’s great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates… Like the best of those early-00s novels, Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger
Engrossing... Choi is an astute, convincing writer…Flashlight [is] a rewarding read
An ambitious generational saga meets mystery thriller that spans several decades and countries… The story begins with a disappearance, then ripples out from there for a compulsive read
Choi’s startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the reader’s mind with cinematic intensity
In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life — the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures — are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last (Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood)
Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi’s fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers (Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House)
Flashlight is a sensitive familial portrait, rigorous in its scope and complexity of feeling. Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity (Raven Leilani, author of Luster)
I devoured Flashlight. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The plot builds like a symphony rising to a crescendo, full of surprise and wonder. The story is as astonishing as it is entirely plausible. Susan Choi clearly knows well the fraught geopolitics of Korea and Japan, and did her homework (Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy)
In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I’m in awe (Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls)
All stars
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Beautifully written and read with incredible sensitivity. Fascinating. Moving. Human. Believable. I will remember it for a long time

Astonishing in every way.

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Spectacular story that truly makes how political are our family lives, intimate, vulnerable, such an important read

Stunning work

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What an incredible reader, her voice, the patterns, highs and lows. The story took me to places unknown to me, has sparked new curiosity and interests. Loved it all.

These sounds will stay in my head

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Out of the Booker shortlist that I’ve read, for me this should have been the clear winner. Such a layered, delicate book, that does not drown in obvious endings and resolutions, skips cleverly over some parts of time, dances back and forth between past and present. It sheds light on a borders, forced emigration and immigration. How identity is shaped by language and mother tongue and yet also transcends them.

A beautiful beautiful book, probably one of my top out of the fifty odd I’ve listened to this year.

Ps Louisa… another utterly unlikeable main character for the roster 😆

Incredible, blew my socks off

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Really enjoyed captured the characters and so tragic life stories covering all emotions but not at all sentimental

Very powerful story how changes can impact a family

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