Reader Score
85%
85% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 58 reviews on
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?
Christopher Moore is an author.
Just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's, Klara and the Sun. Like Never Let Me Go, it's understated and gentle and slowly becomes horrifying, yet strangely hopeful. It's about a dystopian future which it never stops to explain, but reveals in subtext. Such a deft, subtle hand he has.
The New York Review of Books is a literary-intellectual magazine.
“From his first novel to his eighth and latest, Kazuo Ishiguro considers what it means to care for and attend to others, and what happens when that attention gets abused, withdrawn, or distorted.” Jane Hu reviews ‘Klara and the Sun’ https://j.mp/3p3m00e
VC at https://t.co/PK5K4ZzdrG. Blog at https://t.co/AeG4JkFOme. Book at https://t.co/qQB0u6B0oY. Hearts == stars, follows != endorsements.
I forget who recommended Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro to me - thank you, I thoroughly enjoyed this moving vision of artificial intelligence https://t.co/O64NGkUbGo
"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, egoless perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear." --Booker Prize committee
"It 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 Atlantic
"Ishiguro'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 Press
"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 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 Yorker
"One 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?"
--NPR
"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
"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]
Praise from the UK:
"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 Times