Like writers of The Michigan Daily Book Review past, our fearless reviewers are once again tackling the Booker Prize Shortlist. Every year, six English-language books published in the UK and Ireland are nominated, and six Daily reviews follow. Join us as we make our way through this year’s list over the next couple weeks, and, before the announcement Nov. 10, tune in for our final predictions piece, where we will share who we think will win (and who we think should).
— Cora Rolfes, Senior Arts Editor, and Alex Hetzler, Books Beat Editor
Susan Choi’s “Flashlight” begins with a vanishing. One formless night, Serk, a Japanese-born Korean man, is swallowed up by shifting, foamy breakwater while his 10-year-old daughter, Louisa, watches — though she will remember nothing of it. The novel follows Louisa and her mother Anne’s subsequent return to the United States, holding the absence of Serk like a second heartbeat. Across continents and decades, multiple generations and faces, Choi refracts their grief, tracing how one man’s disappearance ripples outward, shaping lives he no longer touches. Through the novel’s oft-changing settings — postwar Japan, the newborn Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the boundless Midwest — “Flashlight” becomes a story of inheritance: what we keep, what we lose and what we misunderstand. It is about a family perpetually orbiting its own pain, wallowing in simultaneous hatred and love while reckoning with the way war’s geopolitics embed themselves in the most private corners of domestic life.
Born herself in Indiana to a Korean father and Jewish American mother, Choi weaves the cultural dissonance of her dual heritage into “Flashlight.” The lives on page mirror her own and encapsulate the lived experiences of many readers with similar backgrounds. Previously authoring novels like “Trust Exercise,” “The Foreign Student” and “American Woman,” Choi has consistently highlighted Asian narratives while ensuring that their stories go beyond racial identity. Readers can easily empathize with a single mother who had to give up her son, mourning a loved one or the tragedy of feeling an all encompassing loneliness. She has earned many accolades for her craft, including the Asian-American Literary Award, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary Award and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. Now, “Flashlight,” originally published as a short story in The New Yorker five years ago, has been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
In an interview with the Booker Prize foundation, Choi said that “Flashlight” emerged from memories of her own childhood, as well as stories she remembers hearing at the time.
“It was a combination of being haunted by childhood memories of a trip to Japan — that was not catastrophic but was still very disruptive — and by stories about the unexplained disappearances, in the late 1970s, of ordinary Japanese people, including a schoolgirl not much older than me.”
Writing the novel now, she added, was a brilliant stroke of timing and survival for her and her readers.
“As for telling the story now — it wasn’t that I chose this moment, so much as that I finally managed to finish the book. But I feel lucky, in that this moment does turn out to be a very receptive one for a story about ordinary people facing extraordinary, often malevolent forces.”
Those forces, in “Flashlight,” aren’t otherworldly — they’re from the alien within. Choi transforms the novel’s namesake into a motif and method: The beam of a flashlight fans out, and only in that sliver of light is knowledge illuminated, just as memory only encapsulates fractions of lives. Like a tractor beam from Louisa’s much-feared “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the light our narrators are armed with isolates one piece of many and draws up the question of what remains unseen: a father’s disappearance, an unnamed disease and families harboring more mystery than memory. The beam catches on a silhouette before shifting away, and Choi asks us to hold that space between illumination and shadow.
In “Flashlight,” Choi’s shifting perspectives don’t simply diversify the narrative, they fracture it. Each chapter reframes the last, widening the emotional distance between characters rather than closing it. Louisa and Serk agree that Anne is inattentive while Anne quietly believes herself to be a “playmate mother,” doing her best within the confines of illness and outside the knowledge of motherhood. Serk praises his daughter’s academic promise even as Anne only sees a child slipping away from her. Through these layered perceptions, every character becomes unreliable — not because they deceive, but because they see incompletely. Their truths overlap like beams of light in fog: illuminating in fragments, never in full. In this way, “Flashlight” mimics the dissonance of real life, where our understanding of others is always partial, always refracted through our own grief and memory. Choi’s prose reminds us that empathy begins in the unknown, in the willingness to sit with what we cannot fully see.
“Flashlight” explores a range of themes — including immigration, familial complexity and grief — but its most compelling thread emerges through a narrative centered on chronic illness. Louisa’s mother, Anne, is afflicted by a severe chronic illness causing a near total loss of her mobility, which only worsens after the family moves to Japan. The narrative investigates the significance of chronic illness for the one experiencing it, but also the hardship and resentment it inflicts upon their family members. With consistent medical negligence and no proper diagnosis, her illness is inherently psychosomatic to others. Blame is placed upon her by family members, loved ones and, most harrowingly, herself.
Immigration in “Flashlight” becomes its own filter, all characters forced to live in spaces between cultures, only seeing fragments of each. Serk, Korean by heritage but born in Japan, is an immigrant everywhere he goes: between nations, between languages, between selves. Anne’s time in Japan casts her as an outsider in both body and tongue, isolated not just by culture but by circumstance. Even after returning to America, her wheelchair becomes its own kind of border, separating her from the world she thought she knew. Louisa inherits this displacement in a different register. In Japan, she is too American; in America, too Korean. No matter how fluently she learns the steps — language, manners and literal choreography — she remains unsynchronized.
“Flashlight” wants us to know that we are shaped, irrevocably, by the forces we cannot see. The gaps are forcibly wedged open between all — father, daughter and wife — bound by love and distanced by a constant, quiet unknowing. Gaps of kinship between every emigration and subsequent exile, ultimately elucidating the vastness between belonging and orbiting — these liminal spaces form the restricted scope in which an identity can grow: Louisa’s confounding lack of a father, Anne’s all-consuming illness and every character embodying the immigrant. As the book begins jumping forward in time, the reader feels this acutely — we are being intentionally left out, meant to grope around in the dark to learn what we missed in the time between. In “Flashlight,” absence is not void — it is architecture. Choi invites us into the architecture of the invisible, and while the light does not touch everything, it reveals where we must live within.
The characters throughout the narrative are startlingly real, their pain tangible and their relationships achingly familiar. Choi writes with precision and empathy, flickering between characters and generations to demonstrate how imperfect perception shapes our lives. Every memory in the novel wobbles like a beam through fog, revealing and obscuring truth in equal parts. Migration, too, becomes an act of partial sight: To leave one home and enter another is to live between understandings, to translate the self again and again. Each of Choi’s characters is, in their own way, an immigrant. Together, they inhabit the novel’s central truth: the feeling of forever standing at the edge of understanding, never quite inside the light.
Daily Arts Writers Archisha Pathak and Estlin Salah can be reached at archpath@umich.edu and essalah@umich.edu, respectively.
