FLASHLIGHT

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, 'Flashlight' by Susan Choi is a dazzling, sweeping, page turning novel stretching across continents, history and different cultures as a family face trauma and separation following a tragic incident.

The many layers to this book make it is difficult to encapsulate its multidimensional content. The opening scene, which began life as a short story, is distinctive and dramatic. Without giving away too much, we meet 10 year old Louisa in the psychiatrist’s consulting room. Instantly portrayed as a rather unlikeable, non-compliant child who deems herself too clever to need therapy or indeed advice from anyone, she takes it upon herself to steal a flashlight from the therapist’s office. She is seeing a therapist because she has recently survived a near drowning which her non-swimmer father hasn’t (he had been carrying a flashlight when he disappeared). The father is Serk Kang, of Korean origin but brought up in Japan during the political era of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the '70s and beyond. When Serk’s parents and younger siblings are coerced into returning to Korea, he recognises this is based on false promises and remains in Japan. After studying hard, he moves to the US in search of the best life and single-mindedly leaves all his past behind him. He marries Anne, an American from the Midwest and together they have Louisa. However unbeknown to Serk and Louisa, Anne also has a son, Tobias, whom she had given up for adoption in her youth.

Circumstances at the university where Serk teaches means he has no alternative but to accept a teaching post back in Japan. It is at this point that Serk, Anne and Louisa’s lives change inconceivably and diverge to take them down very different, often lonely and painful paths. Secrets and lies have led them to this point and it is the same secrets and lies which prevent them from being together.

Choi does not make her lead characters particularly likeable. They are all flawed and rather unloving. Yet you are still invested in their connections and as their lives crumble, the hidden secrets surface and the truth is unearthed. Is it too late to bring them happiness and a resolution?

At times the writing can drift and the many different threads dissipate without conclusions, but Choi draws you into this family’s fractured lives compelling you to hope they find some kind of peace and contentment, making the book hard to put down.