Flashlight
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
**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
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.
