When We Were Orphans

Christopher Banks is the most celebrated detective in 1930s London. He grew up in Shanghai, the son of British parents who both disappeared when he was a child — his father kidnapped by gangsters, his mother taken under mysterious circumstances. He has never stopped believing they can be found. When the world around him begins to darken toward war, he travels back to Shanghai — and what he finds there is not truth but the more disturbing discovery of the lengths to which a person can go to maintain a necessary illusion.

Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans is his most formally adventurous novel: a thriller without the certainties of the thriller genre, a detective novel in which the detective cannot solve the central mystery because the mystery is himself. Its atmosphere of mounting unreality is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.

For readers who love Ishiguro’s oblique approach to psychological truth — a novel that grows stranger and more moving with every page. Published by Faber & Faber.