Korean American writer Susan Choi’s 'Flashlight' shortlisted for Booker Prize

Susan Choi (Choi's official website)

Korean American novelist Susan Choi, best known for her US National Book Award-winning "Trust Exercise," has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "Flashlight."

The Booker Prize described the book as “a thrilling, globe-spanning novel that mines questions of memory, language, identity and family.”

"Flashlight," Choi's sixth novel, opens with a haunting scene by the sea: a 10-year-old girl, Louisa, walks along the beach one night with her father, Serk. He carries a flashlight. He cannot swim. By dawn, Louisa is pulled from the tide, barely alive. And her father is gone.

From there, Choi unspools a sweeping family saga that spans continents and decades, shifting between postwar Korean immigrant communities in Japan, the American suburbs and the North Korean regime.

Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, later remakes himself as a mathematics professor in the United States. Neither Louisa nor his wife Anne knows much about his early life growing up in Japan during World War II.

In chapters that shift from one family member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, the story chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.

Choi, born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and a Jewish American mother, has long been recognized for her explorations of identity, memory and history.

In an interview with her publisher, Choi said, “There were waves upon waves of things I got curious about. I would throw myself into one thing — like what it would have been like to grow up as an ethnic Korean boy in wartime Japan."

Alongside "Flashlight," this year’s shortlist includes "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" by Kiran Desai, "Audition" by Katie Kitamura, "The Rest of Our Lives" by Ben Markovits, "The Land in Winter" by Andrew Miller and "Flesh" by David Szalay.

The Booker Prize winner will be announced on Nov. 10. The winner will receive 50,000 British pounds ($67,000).

"Flashlight" by Susan Choi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)