Klara and the Sun: The Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year
Winner of the Booker Prize and chosen as a Barack Obama summer reading pick, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel arrives trailing considerable expectation. Happily, it earns every bit of it. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered companion designed for children, who spends her days watching the world from a shop window with an almost unsettling attentiveness. She notices everything. People, patterns, the shifting quality of light. What she wants, more than anything, is to be chosen. It's a quietly devastating premise, and Ishiguro makes the most of it. Told entirely from Klara's perspective, the story draws you into a narrator whose understanding of human behaviour is both precise and touchingly incomplete. She interprets the world through her own particular logic, and that gap between her perception and reality is where the novel's real emotional weight lives. Ishiguro writes with characteristic restraint, favouring suggestion over statement, which makes the moments of genuine feeling hit all the harder. At its heart, this is a book about love: what we give, what we withhold, and what we convince ourselves we're capable of. Fans of 'Never Let Me Go' will find familiar territory here, though the tone is warmer, more hopeful in places. A deeply considered, quietly affecting read.
- Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Publisher: Faber & Faber
- Genre: Science Fiction
- ISBN: 978-0571364909
- Pages: 352 pages