The Buried Giant

In a post-Arthurian Britain veiled in mist and forgetting, an elderly Briton named Axl and his wife Beatrice set out on a journey to find their son in a nearby village. They cannot quite remember why they lost touch with him. They cannot remember many things — the entire country seems to be afflicted by a collective amnesia, a forgetting so complete that it has become the weather. As they travel, the nature and the purpose of the forgetting begin to emerge, and with it, a question: whether the mercy of forgetting is something that should be allowed to persist.

Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant works in the register of legend and myth — but its concern is entirely contemporary: what do we owe to a painful past that we might prefer to forget, and what price do we pay for the peace that forgetting provides?

A profound, strange, and unforgettable novel from a Nobel laureate at the height of his powers. Published by Faber & Faber.