Klara and the Sun

Reviews

INTERNATIONAL & #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
ONE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NAMED A BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 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

“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

“A delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“What stays with you in Klara and the Sun is the haunting narrative voice—a genuinely innocent, ego-less perspective on the strange behaviour of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear. This is a fiction that not only asks in general about the nature of consciousness and personal dignity but presses home the assumptions we make about how we value some consciousnesses more than others and how we make others serve the cause of our survival.” —2021 Booker Prize committee

“With his new novel, the Nobel Prize-winner reaffirms himself as our most profound observer of human fragility in the technological era.” —Giles Harvey, The New York Times

“Moving 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 Times

“For 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 Review

“A delicate, haunting story.” —The Washington Post

“As 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)

“A haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A deft dystopian fable about the innocence of a robot that asks big questions about existence” —The Financial Times

“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 (UK)

“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

“The novel is a masterpiece of great beauty, meticulous control and, as ever, clear, simple prose.” —Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times Expand reviews