Flashlight

Flashlight started out as a short story published in the New Yorker, about a father lost at sea while in Japan and a subsequent exchange between a 10-year-old girl and a psychiatrist in 1970s Los Angeles. The novel begins here, too. What did you think of the book’s striking first few pages and how they set the scene for the family epic to come?

Susan Choi has described Flashlight as ‘a story about ordinary people facing extraordinary, often malevolent forces’, while Beejay Wilcox in the Guardian described Flashlight as ‘domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold’, reckoning with ‘the lies that undo families and underpin empires’. What did you think of the way the novel blends the domestic and the geopolitical?

Choi has said one of her inspirations for the novel were ‘stories about the unexplained disappearances, in the late 1970s, of ordinary Japanese people’. Was this a piece of history you were familiar with? What did you find most shocking about Serk’s fate?

Serk is ethnically Korean but was born and raised in Japan. He then immigrates to the US, before being seconded back to Japan by the university where he works. His status in all three places is tenuous, and he struggles to feel a sense of belonging anywhere. What does the book bring to light about the challenges of being an immigrant?

The difficulties in Anne and Serk’s marriage are laid bare. Both are dissatisfied and disappointed, unable to communicate and nursing secrets. What did you make of the couple’s relationship? What prevents them from being able to be open with each other?

Anne becomes unwell but struggles to make herself understood or to be believed. What do Anne’s experiences in both Japan and the US reveal about everyday ableism and sexism?

Flashlight explores the bond between parents and children (father-daughter, mother-daughter, mother-son) and how it can evolve over time and be shaped by tragedy. What did you think of the different parent-child relationships on display in the book? How did they compare with each other? In what ways do you think Louisa’s childhood shapes the mother she becomes?

The novel sweeps across decades and places – from the 1940s to the 2000s, set in Japan, Korea and the United States – alternating between the viewpoints of Serk, Anne, Louisa and, occasionally, Tobias. Did any chapters especially stand out for you? Which characters and countries did you find most interesting and why?

Anson Tong in the Chicago Review of Books said we, as readers, are ‘only holding a flashlight, perceiving what is revealed by a single beam of light’, that the form of the novel ‘evokes how memory can linger in vivid detail for a few specific moments and then zip through multiple years’. Tong says time, in Flashlight, ‘unspools in irregular ways’. What did you think of the novel’s length, structure and pace? Did you find the final chapter satisfying?