The writer Susan Choi speaks to Take Four Books about her novel Flashlight, and, together with presenter James Crawford, they explore its connections to three other literary works.

The novel, which began life as a short story in the New Yorker in 2020, and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021, begins with ten-year-old Louisa and her father taking 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.

The book was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and has recently been longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize.

For her influences, Susan chose: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, from 2010; the Selected Stories of Alice Munro from 1996; and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, from 1871.

Producer: Dominic Howell