NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is “an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness” (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick!
“What stays with you in ‘Klara and the Sun’ is the haunting narrative voice—a genuinely innocent, egoless perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear.” —Booker Prize committee
Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
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"A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick • ONE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF BILL GATES'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Time, NPR, Washington Post, Vogue, USA Today, Town & Country, The Guardian, Vulture, and more “One of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written….I'll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it."
— Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Moving and beautiful…a meditation in the subtlest shades on the subject of whether our species will be able to live with everything it has created.”
— Los Angeles Times“Klara’s quiet but astute observations of human nature land with profound gravity…This dazzling genre-bending work is a delight.”
— Financial Times (London)“Klara’s quiet but astute observations of human nature land with profound gravity…This dazzling genre-bending work is a delight.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Narrator Sura Siu[’s]wonderfully subdued narration proves perfect for portraying Klara…[which] will linger in listeners’ minds for days. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFileA delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope.
— Ron Charles, The Washington PostWhat stays with you in ‘Klara and the Sun’ is the haunting narrative voice—a genuinely innocent, egoless perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear.
— Booker Prize committeeIt aspires to enchantment, or to put it another way, reenchantment, the restoration of magic to a disenchanted world. Ishiguro drapes realism like a thin cloth over a primordial cosmos. Every so often, the cloth slips, revealing the old gods, the terrible beasts, the warring forces of light and darkness.
— Judith Shulevitz, The AtlanticIshiguro’s prose is soft and quiet. It feels like the perfect book to curl up with on a Sunday afternoon. He allows the story to unfold slowly and organically, revealing enough on every page to continue piquing the reader’s curiosity. The novel is an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures...a poignant meditation on love and loneliness
— Maggie Sprayregen, The Associated PressFor 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 ReviewA 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.
— James Wood, The New YorkerOne of the joys of Ishiguro's novels is the way they recall and reframe each other, almost like the same stories told in different formats...Again and again, Ishiguro asks: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a self? And how much of that self can and should we give to others?
— NPRMoving and beautiful… an unequivocal return to form, a meditation in the subtlest shades on the subject of whether our species will be able to live with everything it has created… [A] feverish read, [a] one-sitter… 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 TimesAs with Ishiguro’s other works, the rich inner reflections of his protagonists offer big takeaways, and Klara’s quiet but astute observations of human nature land with profound gravity . . . This dazzling genre-bending work is a delight.
— Publishers Weekly [starred review]“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. Klara and the Sun is wise like a child who decides, just for a little while, to love their doll. “What can children know about genuine love?” Klara asks. The answer, of course, is everything.
— 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.
— John Self, The Times“With its hushed intensity of emotion, this fable about robot love and loneliness confirms Ishiguro as a master prose stylist.
— Ian Thomson, The Evening Standard“It is innocence that forms Ishiguro’s major subject, explored in novels at once familiar and strange, which only gradually display their true and devastating significance.
— Jon Day, The Financial Times“The novel is a masterpiece of great beauty, meticulous control and, as ever, clear, simple prose.
— Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times“A deft dystopian fable about the innocence of a robot that asks big questions about existence
— The Financial TimesA haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible.
— Kirkus Reviews [starred review]Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of several acclaimed novels, won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize and was the basis for a major motion picture. The Buried Giant was a New York Times bestseller, A Pale View of Hills won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and An Artist of the Floating World won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. The Unconsoled won the Cheltenham Prize and Never Let Me Go won the Corine Internationaler Buchpreis, the Serono Literary Prize, the Casino de Santiago European Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1995 Ishiguro received an OBE for Services to Literature and in 1998 the French decoration of Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five.
Andi Arndt is a professional voice actor, the winner of a 2017 Audie Award for Best Romance, and winner of two Earphones Awards.