Klara and the Sun: The Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year

Description

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love? 'There is something so steady and beautiful about the way Klara is always approaching connection, like a Zeno's arrow of the heart. People will absolutely love this book, in part because it enacts the way we learn how to love.' - Anne Enright, The Guardian 'Flawless . . . This is a novel for fans of Never Let Me Go, with which it shares a DNA of emotional openness, the quality of letting us see ourselves from the outside, and a vision of humanity which - while not exactly optimistic - is tender, touching and true.' - The Times

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five. His nine works of fiction have earned him many honours around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize. His work has been translated into over fifty languages and The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both made into acclaimed films, have each sold over a million copies in Faber editions. He received a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan.

'A masterpiece of great beauty, meticulous control and, as ever, clear, simple prose.' - Sunday Times 'Another masterwork, a work that makes us feel afresh the beauty and fragility of our humanity' - Observer 'Intelligent, beautiful, mesmeric and a breeze to read - what more could you want?' - Metro 'A delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope.'- The Washington Post 'For four decades now, Ishiguro has written eloquently about the balancing act of remembering without succumbing irrevocably to the past. Memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects... Klara and the Sun complements [Ishiguro's] brilliant vision...There's no narrative instinct more essential, or more human.' - The New York Times Book Review 'A prayer is a postcard asking for a favor, sent upward. Whether our postcards are read by anyone has become the searching doubt of Ishiguro's recent novels, in which this master, so utterly unlike his peers, goes about creating his ordinary, strange, godless allegories.' - The New Yorker 'Few writers who've ever lived have been able to create moods of transience, loss and existential self-doubt as Ishiguro has - not art about the feelings, but the feelings themselves.' - The Los Angeles Times