Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — Klara is an Artificial Friend who observes the world with absolute clarity and absolute limitation simultaneously, chosen by a teenager whose health is declining and who needs her in ways she must learn to understand. Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize lecture novel — narrated by a consciousness both less and more than human — a novel of quiet devastation from one of the greatest living writers. Published by Faber & Faber.

Come Rain or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — in the space of a single evening, a journey, a meal, a game of cards, everything is decided or not decided between a man and a woman who have known each other for fifteen years. Ishiguro’s short story as compressed and precisely balanced as a Japanese object — few pages that repay repeated reading. Part of the Faber Stories series. Published by Faber & Faber.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — the most celebrated detective in 1930s London has never stopped believing his parents, who disappeared in Shanghai when he was a child, can be found. When he returns to Shanghai as the world darkens toward war, he discovers not truth but the lengths to which a person can go to maintain a necessary illusion. A thriller without the certainties of the thriller genre — growing stranger and more moving with every page. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — Stevens, a perfect butler, takes a rare motoring holiday and is finally alone with the question he has spent his life not asking: whether the life he gave to perfect service was a life worth giving. Booker Prize winner 1989 — a masterpiece of first-person narration in which every sentence means more than it says, and Stevens’s careful prose becomes the vehicle for a tragedy of unacknowledged feeling and unrecoverable time. Published by Faber & Faber.