Flashlight: Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 - Hardcover

Choi, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1787335127 ISBN 13: 9781787335127

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2025

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
WATERSTONES FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026

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

‘Ferociously smart and full of surprises’ Eleanor Catton

‘Engrossing... Full of brains and mystery’ Telegraph

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.

A Book of the Year for the Guardian, Time, New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, FT and Barack Obama

'Big, bold and surprising’ Guardian

'Illuminates the buried secrets of the human heart' Oprah Daily

'Gorgeous... Almost impossibly heartbreaking' New York Magazine

'It will make your head spin in the best way' Dakota Johnson

'Endlessly dazzling' Vogue

READERS LOVE FLASHLIGHT

'Compelling, fascinating, original. Read this book'
'Five stars. Heartbreaking'
'A beautifully written story of a family across decades'
'I loved it - the best read in years. Glorious'
'Absolutely brilliant'

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1787335127
• ISBN 13: 9781787335127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464