Klara and the Sun

Klara is an Artificial Friend — a solar-powered AF designed to be a companion for children, positioned in a store window where she observes the street and the people passing, builds her understanding of the human world, and waits to be chosen. She is chosen by Josie — a teenager whose health is declining in ways her mother monitors with a combination of love and desperation — and what Klara observes, as she enters Josie’s world and tries to understand it, is the question that has always been at the centre of Ishiguro’s fiction: what does it mean to be devoted to someone, and what are the limits of devotion?

Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize lecture novel, is his most formally original in years — narrated by a consciousness that is both less and more than human, that sees the world with an absolute clarity and an absolute limitation simultaneously.

Essential Ishiguro — a novel of quiet devastation from one of the greatest living writers. Published by Faber & Faber.