A 10-year-old girl is walking along a deserted beach with her father. Unable to swim, and wearing a suit and clutching a flashlight, the man frets over his daughter’s safety. But it is he who is at risk. Rescuers later find the girl, Louisa, dazed and hypothermic. Her father has disappeared.

So begins National Book Award winner Susan Choi’s sixth novel, “Flashlight.” The book explores questions of identity, isolation, family and whether we can ever escape the past. Spanning continents and decades, the story takes readers to a Korean enclave in pre-World War II Japan, a North Korean prison and Midwestern strawberry farm, among other settings.

Choi, a professor in the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, will join The Banner’s Book Club on Tuesday at 6 p.m. to discuss her latest work. We spoke with Choi ahead of her visit.

What was your inspiration in writing “Flashlight”?

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The book comes from a lot of different places, and I think one of the earliest points of origin would be a time that I spent in Japan as a little girl with my parents. We were not the same people as the characters in the book, and the things that happened to us were not the same things. Our stay in Japan was very uneventful, but it was at the same time period in the late 1970s, and I was about the same age as Louisa. It was a very impactful experience being in a completely different culture and a completely different language. Much later, I started learning about these unsolved disappearances that had taken place in Japan at roughly the same time as when my family had been there and that got the wheels of imagination turning. I started wondering what if something like that had happened to a visiting family.

“Flashlight” first appeared as a New Yorker short story. How did that come about?

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I had been working on this idea that I was pretty sure was a book, but it was still unformed. I had a lot of ideas about where the characters came from and how they interacted with each other. But I wasn’t sure the main event of the book was plausible. I generated a lot of material about these characters before they went to Japan and even material about them after they came back and then some material while they were there, but nothing was structured. It was frustrating. I decided to experiment with carving out a certain discrete portion of this material to see if it could stand alone as a story. And that is the story that was published as “Flashlight.”

How did you research the book? Did you travel to Japan and Korea?

I did make a trip to Japan and Korea in the summer of ’23, but not to research the book. I was concerned that going to these locations would disrupt the internal image that I had of places that I needed for the book. The Japan that I remembered and the Japan that exists now are completely different places. I like working from memory; there’s something very emotional about memory. Memory is not accurate, ever. I wanted to preserve the ways in which my memories were inaccurate.

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In terms of research, there were so many different phases. There’s research to get ideas and then there’s research to confirm facts and then all kinds of research in between. When I started, I was just sort of ranging around and interested in different things that I didn’t even know whether they would even go in the book.

Cover of Susan Choi's book, “Flashlight.”

I’d love to hear about your writing process. On a macro level, how long does it take for you to come up with a plot and write it? And on a daily basis, what does your practice of writing look like?

There’s never one answer to this question. I don’t manage to write daily, ever, although I wish I could. I go in and out of periods of being productive. When I roughly know what the right direction is, I try to write as often as I can. I’m a morning writer. I benefit from routine, but it’s hard to achieve it because there’s always something else happening in life. I also have a teaching job and a family. Also every project has been really different. This book evolved over a really long period of time.

Are you working on another novel now?

I’m usually pretty slow between projects, and now is no different. I don’t really know what’s next. My books always seem to take five or six years. I would really love to be deep into something this time next year, but right now I have no idea what it would be.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.