This is the second of six posts in which we examine the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.
The Architecture of Memory: Susan Choi’s Flashlight
Susan Choi occupies a unique and significant position in contemporary Anglophone literature. Over the course of six major novels published across more than twenty-five years, she has evolved from a critically acclaimed literary novelist into a recognised canonical figure, a status underlined by a consistent stream of major literary honours, including the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction. Her novels are characterised by their intense psychological depth, combined with a vast historical and geopolitical scope, often placing intimate dramas against the backdrop of American political radicalism, academic isolation, and transnational identity.
Choi’s work is characterised by a profound intellectual tension: the simultaneous mastery and deliberate deconstruction of objective reality. Her professional grounding — having worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker for a period — instilled a rigorous discipline focused on external verification and absolute factual specificity. Yet, her mature narrative strategy frequently employs structural unreliability and shifting perspectives, most famously in her National Book Award-winning work, Trust Exercise. This deliberate choice to dismantle narrative certainty, while possessing the organisational tools of journalistic truth, highlights the inherent instability of memory and the past when filtered through charged emotional or political contexts.
It is this rare versatility — the ability to move seamlessly between meticulous historical reconstruction, as displayed in American Woman, and high-concept meta-fiction, as championed in Trust Exercise and her new work, Flashlight — that secures her place as a writer uniquely suited to interrogating both objective historical ‘truth’ and subjective, remembered experience. Her literary project asks fundamental questions: where does the authority of truth ultimately reside, and how do we narrate the events that define our lives when the available perspectives are inherently limited and potentially self-serving? For writers, her oeuvre provides a masterclass in how to manage high structural risk with authorial control, prioritising the emotional truth over mere factual recounting.
Susan Choi was born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, and was raised there until the family moved to Houston, Texas. Her Korean father and Jewish mother instilled in her a cross-cultural background that profoundly informs her thematic preoccupations with identity, displacement, and the challenges of national belonging.
A formative, disruptive experience in her childhood — a trip to Japan — was so significant that Choi herself has described her personal narrative as falling into two distinct halves: ‘before and after Japan’. This period was followed by family disruption, her mother’s debilitating illness, financial struggle, and a lingering sense that the family had been afflicted by ‘some sort of curse’ while abroad. This personal history of geopolitical displacement and inexplicable consequence serves as a powerful, subterranean source for her fictional explorations of loss, mystery, and the long shadow of the past, particularly evident in the genesis of her latest novel.
Choi pursued a rigorous academic path, studying literature at Yale University for her Bachelor of Arts degree and later completing a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in writing at Cornell University. Her undergraduate years in the 1980s involved an intense study of literature and poststructuralist literary theory, which systematically questions fixed narratives and authority.
This theoretical scepticism was immediately followed by a period of intensely practical, fact-focused employment as a fact-checker for The New Yorker during the 1990s. This intellectual dynamic is crucial to understanding her creative output. She received training that systematically questioned fixed narratives, followed by journalistic work that mandated seeking and verifying objective facts. She noted that it was during this period of self-support while writing her first novel that she realised ‘what kind of writer’ she truly was. The tension between theoretical doubt (questioning who gets to tell the story) and journalistic rigour (knowing how to verify the facts) is the engine driving her unique narrative style, enabling her deep literary engagement with unreliable memory and the limitations of perspective.
The Literary Catalogue: A Progression of Themes
Choi’s novels are not merely a collection of works but represent a clear thematic and technical progression, characterised by a meticulous, multi-year process involving extensive research and structural revision between major publications. Her bibliography consists of six core novels and a picture book, each engaging with the ‘outsider’ archetype in increasingly sophisticated ways
| Year | Title | Key Context and Themes |
| 1998 | The Foreign Student | Post-war narratives of displacement, following a Korean orphan survivor of the Korean War to 1950s America; explores identity, loneliness, and transformation. Awarded the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. |
| 2003 | American Woman | Historical fiction focused on political radicalism, loosely based on the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping. Explores ideological disillusionment, fidelity, and surveillance within the militant left. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. |
| 2008 | A Person of Interest | A literary thriller focused on academic paranoia and social isolation. Centres on a professor facing suspicion after a series of murders, examining media portrayal and the nature of outsider status. A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. |
| 2013 | My Education | A campus novel and coming-of-age story detailing a complex, intoxicating affair between a graduate student and the older wife of a charismatic professor. Awarded a Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. |
| 2019 | Trust Exercise | A seminal work of metafiction set in an elite performing arts high school. Uses radical structural disruption to re-contextualise the past and challenge the authority of the narrative. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. |
| 2025 | Flashlight | A sprawling geopolitical family drama and mystery tracing a father’s disappearance across Japan, the DPRK, and the US. Explores memory, language, and the multigenerational costs of historical consequence. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. |
The arc of these works shows an initial focus on external, historical forms of alienation — war trauma, political extremism — before shifting to internal, social alienation rooted in academic or relational paranoia. Her later works, Trust Exercise and Flashlight, then synthesise these concerns, powerfully demonstrating how massive, external historical forces generate profound internal, family-based isolation and trauma. The spacing between the novels, often five or six years, speaks to a deeply meticulous process essential for crafting narratives that ‘deftly criss-cross continents and decades’. Choi also expanded her catalogue with the publication of the children’s picture book, Camp Tiger, in 2019.
The Architecture of Style and Unreliability
Choi’s literary signature is her relentless exploration of identity, history, and memory as contested terrains. Her narratives consistently assert that attempts to ‘erase their past selves’ inevitably fail because ‘the past will not be past’. She plunges readers deep into the psychological landscapes of individuals caught between moral ambiguity and systemic alienation.
In her earlier career, her prose sometimes exhibited a tendency towards ‘straining for a really lyrical way of describing something’, a trait she later approached with critical distance.
By the time she wrote Trust Exercise, her style had undergone a conscious, noticeable shift. The prose became significantly ‘tighter’ and ‘more compressed’, driven by a desire for a ‘distilled efficient story-length pacing’, often associated with the short story form. She became less preoccupied with aspects of prose associated with overt style, such as ‘the beautiful metaphor or the perfectly apt physical description’. This evolution reflects a sophisticated literary agenda that prioritises narrative rigour and thematic urgency over ornamental language. The mature style is precise and demanding, eschewing meandering exposition for urgent emotional and structural disclosure, proving that stylistic sophistication can reside in compression and efficiency, not just lyrical flourish.
The core of Choi’s formal innovation, particularly in her later career, lies in her sophisticated deployment of the unreliable narrator and structural disruption, turning ambiguity into a tool for ethical and cultural critique.
Trust Exercise stands as the paradigmatic example of her structural daring. The novel begins with a seemingly conventional narrative of adolescent sexual and emotional awakening, only to introduce a dramatic structural break roughly halfway through. A second, entirely different narrative voice abruptly interrupts the initial account, presenting ‘her own truth about events we previously thought we understood’. This structural ‘violence’ forces the reader to confront their own assumptions, their ‘suspension of disbelief’, and the perceived ‘authority of the author’.
Choi has discussed this technique as an effort to take the reader on an experience of ‘doubt and surprise’ that is disruptive, yet ultimately contained within an ethical framework, ensuring she does not entirely ‘destroy that trust’. The emergence of the disputing voice, belonging to a previously minor character, is a powerful meta-fictional intervention demanding narrative autonomy. This voice’s self-proclamation — explicitly demanding self-definition — is an engagement with contemporary discourse concerning marginalised voices challenging established narratives of the past.
The implementation of narrative disruption in this manner is far more than a postmodern flourish; it is a calculated artistic response to the nature of contemporary political discourse, which she has characterised as a ‘war of political stories’. By structurally destabilising the fictional narrative and questioning the veracity of emotional accounts, she compels the reader to acknowledge the mechanisms by which seemingly ‘manipulative and fraudulent’ versions of reality gain attention and belief in public life. The successful execution of such meta-narrative complexities requires a specific level of artistic maturity, suggesting that the technical risk is expertly managed by an ‘experienced hand’ now comfortable with shifting the foundational ground of the story itself.
A further demonstration of Choi’s rigorous approach to thematic material is her subtle practice of reusing and re-contextualising intensely charged scenes across different novels. For instance, the titular ‘trust exercise’ in her 2019 novel — where blindfolded acting students engage in fraught, intimate contact — is a motif replicated almost identically in her earlier Pulitzer Prize finalist novel, American Woman. In both instances, the scene involves the same highly specific detail: a character being identified by a crush based on the physical ridges of their denim jeans. By recurring to this specific scenario, Choi explores the enduring themes of adolescent vulnerability, non-verbal communication, and the complex mechanics of identification and betrayal under conditions of imposed intimacy or blindness, demonstrating a thoughtful, recursive depth in her oeuvre.
Her research methodology often extends to finding deep, intertextual connections between seemingly disparate domains. For Trust Exercise, she explored the link between performance techniques and psychological manipulation. She discovered through her reading that certain Scientology practices were sourced directly from Sanford Meisner acting techniques. This discovery — that methods of psychological or artistic coercion cross cultural and institutional boundaries — provided the ‘dark uses’ she explored in the high school drama setting. This demonstrates a process of research that looks not merely for historical detail, but for surprising philosophical overlaps that can be leveraged to drive thematic critique.
The Writer’s Craft and Process
Choi’s writing process, while described as ‘always changing’ over the course of her long career, adheres to specific foundational principles that prioritise character and emotional consequence over abstract thematic plotting.
Choi generally begins a new project with a compelling situation or character, striving to generate the plot organically from that origin point. She maintains that starting with explicit thematic concerns tends to leave the writing ‘inert’, cautioning writers against abstract thematic plotting. The non-linearity evident in her most expansive work is often a strategic choice, a methodology specifically developed for approaching complex, trauma-laden narratives.
For instance, in contrast to previous works written in linear page order, Flashlight was written ‘in circles’ and described as ‘very nonlinear’. This approach was rooted in a deliberate ‘personal writing hack’: she chose to ‘dive into the story after all the bad stuff has happened’ and focus first on describing the consequences, delaying the exploration of the causes until later drafts. She has stated, ‘that’s where that story really came from, was this desire of mine just to get in there and try to describe the consequences. And then I thought later you can worry about how to describe the causes.’
This technique mirrors the psychological experience of trauma, where the immediate, disruptive emotional effects are prioritised, and clarity regarding the source only emerges through persistent, cyclical investigation. By prioritising consequence over cause and thematic framework, the narrative itself is permitted to dictate the terms of disclosure, granting the characters’ emotional states primacy and ensuring that geopolitical tragedy is not reduced to mechanistic plotting.
The historical and geopolitical scope of novels like American Woman and Flashlight demands meticulous research. The handling of geographically and chronologically sprawling narratives — such as the detailed chronological and political settings required for Flashlight (post-war Japan, Korean immigrant communities, DPRK repatriation efforts) — is arguably supported by her early professional discipline as a fact-checker. This background ensures that historical and geographical details, even minute ones, are meticulously handled, providing solid grounding for the high-stakes emotional and structural risks she takes. For Flashlight, the editorial process required extensive refinement of character backstories, establishing ‘historical grounding’, and detailing the geopolitical tensions, confirming the need for a deeply researched foundation beneath the fictional mystery.
Flashlight (2025) – Geopolitics and the Unsayable
Flashlight, Susan Choi’s sixth novel, represents an ambitious summation of her career-long thematic and formal interests, earning a prestigious shortlisting for the Booker Prize 2025. It successfully balances a vast geopolitical scope with an intimate portrait of familial loss, weaving together ‘historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance’.
The novel originated from the short story of the same name, which itself stemmed from an earlier piece of creative non-fiction, ‘Some Japanese Ghosts’. The core inspiration was twofold: her own ‘disruptive’ childhood memory of a trip to Japan and historical accounts of ‘unexplained disappearances, in the late 1970s, of ordinary Japanese people’. While she initially intended the book to be a ‘lean, allusive, perhaps even fragmentary’ novella, it grew organically into her longest work, covering immense distances and time periods.
The novel’s geopolitical span is vast, stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, and shifting between post-war Korean immigrant life in Japan, suburban America, and the North Korean regime. The story grapples directly with the lingering consequences of Japan’s colonisation of Korea (1910–1945) and the fate of the Zainichi Korean community in post-war Japan. The central crisis is therefore not a private event, but one driven by the unforgiving currents of twentieth-century history. The Booker judges recognised that the family is ‘swept up in the tides of 20th-century history’.
The narrative centres on the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Serk (also known as Seok or Hiroshi), a Korean émigré and academic, during a year-long academic secondment in a coastal Japanese town. The event begins when his ten-year-old daughter, Louisa, is found washed up on a beach following a walk with her father, who is then presumed drowned. This traumatic event shatters the small family unit.
The story opens with Louisa, a ‘tight little knot of fury’, evading and deflecting in a psychiatrist’s office, struggling to process her father’s loss and her mother’s subsequent invalid state. Her trauma is visceral; the consequence precedes any logical explanation. The novel then maps the hidden histories that led to this moment:
- Serk: Born in 1940s Japan to Korean parents, Serk immigrated to the US for an academic position after his immediate family was tragically misled into repatriating to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) under the false promise of a ‘socialist paradise’. Serk’s disappearance during the Japan secondment is, in reality, linked to his clandestine goal of finding a pathway back for his family, illustrating how macro-political deceit can generate crushing micro-level catastrophe.
- Anne: The American mother, Anne, also harbours significant secrets. She was a teenage mother who had secretly given up a baby, Tobias, before meeting Serk. She and Serk found a connection through a mutual sense of remoteness, as both sought to ‘erase their past selves’, yet neither could truly overcome their individual isolation. Anne’s decision to welcome Tobias back into her life further complicates the family’s environment of unstated truths.
Flashlight employs multiple character voices — including Louisa, Serk, Anne, Tobias, and Ji-Hoon. Unlike Trust Exercise, where shifts in voice violently challenge the integrity of the narrative, the multiple perspectives here are used to collectively map an enormous, unknowable event — Serk’s fate — from different points of view across different points in time and ideological displacement.
The novel is a powerful investigation into how the silence of what goes unsaid affects families, where the ‘negative space is a part of the picture’. It addresses the cruel research dimension involving Cold War-era geopolitical scams and ethnic diaspora politics, confirming Choi’s interest in ‘ordinary people facing extraordinary, often malevolent forces’. The novel’s success lies in its use of non-linear, expansive structures to cover immense historical periods and complex, intersecting identities, confirming a confidence in ambition and scope that cements Choi’s place as a major writer.
Susan Choi’s enduring contribution to contemporary literature is rooted in her unique synthesis of the intensely personal and the geopolitically vast. Her career demonstrates an evolving commitment to challenging the limits of narrative form and content, consistently exploring the weight of history and the fluidity of identity.
Her most significant formal achievement is the strategic deployment of narrative disruption, transforming the unreliable narrator from a conventional literary trope into a powerful device for cultural critique. This manoeuvre, perfected in Trust Exercise, prompts readers to examine the ethics of storytelling and consumption, forcing an active, questioning engagement with the text.In her culminating works, such as Flashlight, she successfully synthesises this structural complexity with the detailed historical immersion seen in earlier works. Choi’s literary practice showcases a rigorous, mature mastery of craft, evolving her style to achieve maximum thematic impact. For any writer seeking to understand how to leverage historical detail against the radical instability of personal perspective, the oeuvre of Susan Choi provides a meticulous and masterful masterclass. Her novels remind us that even as we strive for factual truth, the most compelling narratives often reside in the emotional fallout, the ambiguity, and the silences between the facts.
The Original Writers Group 