Flashlight – Susan Choi

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One summer night, a man disappears while walking with his daughter on a Japanese beach. Born Korean, Serk has a complicated relationship with his past. His daughter and American wife become disorientated, facing the challenges of ordinary life all the while grieving for Serk and wondering what really happened the night he vanished. The titular flashlight is a device, flashing in and out of key moments, highlighting atrocities and being a beacon of hope.

The fact – that the flashlight, in falling, landed almost noiselessly in sand – rippled over her like the pale cloud of light on the ceiling. It was not a memory, as Louisa understood memory: a fragmented, juddering filmstrip of image and sound. This wasn’t something but nothing, an absence where a presence was expected. There had been no clattering onto the rocks. There had been no splash in the water. The flashlight had landed almost noiselessly in sand.

SUZY
● Love love love a book where there is such profound learning amongst such a gripping and mysterious storyline. Flashlight opened my eyes to another part of history that I had previously been embarrassingly ignorant of. Many of the main characters in this book weren’t particularly likeable, but the author did such a wonderful job of making them so incredibly human that I couldn’t help but care for them deeply. 

RACHEL
●  To be honest I DNF’d Flashlight on my first read. The opening chapters hooked me but mid-way I couldn’t work out where the story was heading and my attention began to wane. I did eventually go back to it and am glad I did because at the two thirds point I became gripped, learning about a post-war historical exploitation and its wide-reaching consequences.

The chapters before this move between times and locations, developing each character by detailing their influential life moments. These chapters create a sense of place and show how the immigrant characters became lost in them. So there was worth in those pages, I just wish Choi got to, or alluded to, the best stuff a bit sooner.

Published 2025
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
464 pages