Klara and the Sun
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First published in 2021, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to provide companionship to children. Observant, patient and unusually perceptive, Klara watches the world from her place in a shop window, studying the habits of passers-by and the changing light of the sun while waiting to be chosen. When she enters the home of Josie, a young girl whose health is fragile, Klara becomes devoted to her new companion and begins to search for ways to protect her. Through Klara’s distinctive perspective, ordinary gestures and half-understood conversations acquire an unexpected significance, revealing a society shaped by technological progress, social division and difficult choices about the future.
With characteristic restraint, Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore love, sacrifice, faith and the limits of human understanding, asking whether consciousness can be measured by its origins or by the depth of its attachments. Klara’s literal-minded observations expose the contradictions of the human world without diminishing its capacity for tenderness, while the novel’s recurring image of the sun suggests a fragile hope that may be both spiritual and material. Published more than three decades after The Remains of the Day, the novel continues Ishiguro’s preoccupation with unreliable perception, memory and the quiet costs of devotion, bringing these concerns into an age of artificial intelligence and genetic intervention. The result is a moving meditation on what makes us irreplaceable to one another—and on the mysteries that remain even when we believe we understand a life.
From the book
“Perhaps all humans are lonely.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
On Klara and the Sun
“A haunting, luminous novel.”
— The Guardian