The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Choi, Susan. Flashlight. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

Louisa and her father walk a stone breakwater at the edge of a rented seaside town while her mother stays inside the small house, unwell. He carries a flashlight, though evening light still lingers, and holds Louisa’s hand, though she does not need it. The scene introduces a family shaped by caution, absence, and longing.

The novel then turns to Seok, a boy in Korea during the period when Japanese rule imposes new names and habits. At school he is Hiroshi, swift in the yard and quick with letters, and at home he remains Seok, the son of a laborer and a mother who conjures food and clothing from almost nothing. He learns to read signs and faces, steals to help, and writes careful letters that others dictate. The split between names and duties trains him to survive change. The family’s small world of lanes, markets, and rail maps opens into talk of borders, war, and the dangerous authority of the state. Seok’s childhood sets the pattern of improvisation and guardedness that will mark his life.

Louisa’s strand begins when her parents take her to Japan for a year because her father has been invited to teach. Airport confusion, uniformed greeters, and a tour bus camera teach her the rules of a place that sees her as foreign. In Tokyo and then in a provincial town, Louisa’s mother withdraws to a radio and a couch, while her father moves with brisk confidence. Louisa goes to school in a white hat and red rucksack, learns classroom songs and chores, and invents a closed-mouth Japanese Smile to hide her teeth. She passes through markets where vendors hail the American Girl, and through stairwells that smell of a building’s neglect. Her father takes her alone on a train to meet Mrs. Ishida, a woman whose existence he refuses to explain. The secretive visit and the casual promise of a beach trip that never happens expose a rift in the marriage that Louisa can feel but not name.

Anne’s strand begins when she and Louisa are forced out of Anne’s brother’s house on the last day of fourth grade. Anne has multiple sclerosis. Gerald’s money and a small university pension barely cover rent in a dark apartment far from parks and safety. Louisa lies about her age to work at a pizza shop and carries home throwaway dinners. Years scrape by until Anne finds steady hours typing at an MS foundation and a remission steadies her hands. Mother and daughter move into a modest garden complex where doors stand open and neighbors help carry bags. Anne meets Walter, a kind man who learns her routines and becomes part of her daily survival. The new life is plain, but it is theirs.

Serk, who is Seok with a different name and a different country, looks back at images that others made of him and hears the accusation and affection inside the words little emperor. He studies in Japan under the care of a monk called Waku, and eventually reaches the United States to teach. The old vigilance persists. He fears what it would mean, for himself and for Louisa, if it were known that he has family in the North. In Japan he argues with a relative about permits and risk. In America he builds a scholarly life and a home that cannot hold, then leaves it. The father who once held a flashlight on a summer shoreline becomes a distant voice, and then a set of rules that others obey.

The book returns to the years of imprisonment that Seok endures before he becomes Serk. A camp in the mountains starves men on corn and grass. Guards choreograph pursuit toward fences so they can shoot and claim rewards. Prisoners dig coal with hands and broken shovels and push carts uphill through tunnels. The warnings are simple: do not walk by the fence, do not be alone near the escarpments, do not draw notice. Survival is a matter of listening, of gleaning scraps, of deciding which orders to obey and which to ignore. The hunger, the cold, and the shock of bodies that fail become part of the man who will later test restaurant food for his daughter and carry a light on a bright beach.

In the final movement Louisa travels to Seoul to manage her father’s care at the National Medical Center. She learns bus routes, mistrusts hospital schedules, and fights for moments when the room is quiet enough for his hearing to return. She negotiates with nurses and caretakers, moves his rogue foot back to the wheelchair’s rest, and holds his twig-light hand while watching the faint rippling of his throat. She refuses measures that would restart a body that can no longer speak to her, and she accepts morphine when the small twitch in his fingers looks like pain. Her decision is exact. She keeps watch. When the rippling stops, the book’s long braid of names, borders, travels, and rooms closes on a stillness.

Flashlight ends where it began, with a daughter and a father linked by a small circle of light and an instinct to safeguard. Across six parts, the story moves between the making of Seok into Serk and the making of Louisa and Anne into a household that can endure. The plot binds childhood, exile, secrecy, illness, and care into one path that leads from a breakwater to a hospital bed, from the fear of the dark to the careful choice to let it come.