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  • Published: 3 March 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529932515
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $24.99

Flashlight




SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 – The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from Japan to the USA to 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.

  • Published: 3 March 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529932515
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Susan Choi

Susan Choi is the author of the novels Flashlight, Trust Exercise, My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman and The Foreign Student. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Flashlight began as a short story and received the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Susan Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

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Booker Prize shortlist 2025

The shortlist for the 2025 Booker Prize has been announced, with four Penguin Random House titles named this year.