Author
Flashlight
Flashlight is a 2025 literary fiction novel by Susan Choi that traces a Korean-American family across four generations, from a 1978 beach disappearance in Japan through decades of secrecy, displacement, and grief. When ten-year-old Louisa is found half-drowned on a Japanese shore after a nighttime walk, her father Serk is presumed dead, and the family fractures around the silence that follows. Choi follows the Kang family's tangled history—rooted in postwar Korea, wartime Japan, and Cold War politics—through the perspectives of Serk, his wife Anne, and their daughter, weaving personal trauma into a larger story of national identity and historical erasure. Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the novel is a study in absence: what families cannot say, what histories refuse to surface, and how a single beam of light can only ever illuminate a fraction of the dark.