Flashlight: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 - Hardcover

Choi, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1787335127 ISBN 13: 9781787335127

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2025

Synopsis

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

‘Ferociously smart and full of surprises’ Eleanor Catton

‘A family epic… Engrossing’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Extraordinary… Heartbreaking’ Roddy Doyle

‘Sheer pleasure’ 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

‘Instantly bewitching’ Jennifer Egan

‘Four generations’ worth of family life… Endlessly dazzling’ Vogue

‘A major world writer… Choi has a profound gift’ New York Times

‘I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it’ Barbara Demick

About this title

About the Author

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction – and was a US bestseller. Flashlight began as a short story and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. 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