by Susan Choi
Publisher Penguin Random House
Review by Rachel Nightingale
It’s important to state at the outset that Flashlight is literary fiction rather than conventional crime fiction. As a reviewer for Sisters in Crime, my expectation tends to be that the books I receive will follow the conventions of the crime genre, whether fiction or non-fiction, yet this book was vastly different to anything I’ve received before. It is, rather, biographical literary fiction, traversing the lives of Louisa, her Korean father Serk, and her American mother Anne. It is definitely worth setting aside your expectations about it being a crime novel though, because Flashlight is an endlessly fascinating story, and it does have a mystery at its core.
Ten year old Louisa has finally convinced her father Srek to go swimming with her, after a summer of swimming alone while her parents are absorbed in their own lives, but this special occurrence ends in her father’s disappearance. As the novel progresses it becomes apparent Serk’s disappearance is only one of many from coastal areas of Japan and a hidden story starts to emerge.
Flashlight unfolds like a complex jigsaw puzzle, moving backwards and forwards through time and across countries, traversing Japan, South Korea, the United States, the UK and France. It begins like conventional biography, with the origin stories of Louisa’s parents gradually converging into Louisa’s story. Her childhood experiences are then interwoven with those of her father, who grew up in post-World War 2 Japan as an exile from South Korea. Louisa’s childhood is punctuated by dramas and shadowed by possible threats due to her parents’ pasts, of which she is unaware. Events in the lives of individuals and families, when seen with the long-distance lens of the future, take on a new urgency. Choi uses the reader’s knowledge of what is going to happen expertly to build a sense of foreboding.
Based in historical facts, Flashlight takes you on a deep dive into hidden events from the 1960s to the present as they deeply impact Louisa, her father, mother and half-brother Tobias. There are unexpected twists throughout. The characters are not always likeable, but are very human in their behaviours and responses to the circumstances they find themselves in. From the first scene, when the child Louisa has a clash of wills with a psychiatrist, you can see her precocious brilliance.
Tiny details and moments create a strong sense of life in Japan and US at the time of events, and of how place is experienced differently by different people, but also how people become different selves in different locations. The novel explores ideas of identity, alienation and membership, and the question of what it means to move to a new place. The cover is an excellent metaphor for this theme, showing a winding road in a bleak landscape, with a person of uncertain identity in the distance.
The writing is like poetry, sparse and taut, every word carefully chosen to sketch places and people with vivid clarity. The story leaves you feeling you have lived alongside Louisa, Anne, Tobias and Serk, sharing their regrets and pettiness and sadness. And like a jigsaw puzzle, the full picture that allows understanding of the true forces at play is only revealed at the very end.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025, Flashlight is an epic journey that will hold you fascinated every step of the way.
Publisher’s blurb
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.