Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021
An artificial friend watches a child and the people who love her, trying to learn what makes a person singular—and whether love can be copied.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro writes about people who keep their feelings just under the surface, and the sentences are calm enough that the ache arrives slowly. Start with «The Remains of the Day», where a butler's motoring holiday becomes a reckoning with duty and all he never said, or «Never Let Me Go», in which a carer looks back on her boarding-school childhood and the two friends she has loved since. Both reward patience and leave you thinking about restraint, loyalty and what gets left unsaid.
Feels like tenderness, memory and melancholy.
Start with Klara and the Sun.
Klara’s vision sometimes breaks into grids, a device Ishiguro uses to remind us that her way of seeing is not ours.
A mother’s suspicion that love may be a superstition we haven’t outgrown.
I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better. Books by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005
A carer looks back on her English boarding-school childhood and the two friends she has loved since, in a world whose rules she never thinks to question.
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989
A butler's motoring holiday becomes a quiet reckoning with duty, dignity and a life spent not saying what he felt.
Authors with a similar feel
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
BookFeed is a feed of real passages from real books. It learns what moves you and finds your next book.
Open BookFeedFree, no sign-up.