Flashlight
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2026
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
WATERSTONES FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
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’
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ambitious if digressive latest from National Book Award winner Choi (Trust Exercise) spans multiple continents and perspectives in its exploration of a family mystery. Serk, an ethnic Korean man raised in Japan, immigrates to an East Coast college town in the U.S. in the 1960s. There, he meets a young seeker named Anne, and they marry and have a daughter, Louisa. Serk and Anne are both estranged from their families, and their marriage is soon defined by its own tragic and abrupt separation. When Louisa is 10, she and her father go for a walk along the beach while visiting Japan. Though she remembers nothing of the night in question, Louisa is found half drowned the next day, and her father is missing and presumed dead. As Louisa and Anne attempt to move on with their lives, it becomes clear that Serk's disappearance is not what it seemed on first impression. Though long sections of character development often fail to gel with the main events, Choi's well-shaded characters are also the book's strongest element, particularly as she sharply delineates the difficult relationship between Louisa and Anne, who often treat each other more like housemates or acquaintances than mother and daughter. This gripping story of a family in crisis is tough to shake.
