Kazuo Ishiguro’s Featured Book
Klara and the Sun
The magnificent new novel from Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. An international literary event, Klara and the Sun will be published simultaneously on March 2, 2021, by Knopf Canada, Faber & Faber in the U.K. and Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S.
Klara and the Sun is a thrilling feat of world-building, and a heartbreaking novel of tenderness and humanity. It gives us an unexpected glimpse into the modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love? It is Ishiguro’s first novel since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. In its award citation, the Nobel committee described his books as “novels of great emotional force” and said that he has “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Buy the Book:
Indigo
Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Other Books
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning masterpiece became an international bestseller on publication, was adapted into an award-winning film, and has since come to be regarded as a modern classic.
The Remains of the Day is a spellbinding portrayal of a vanished way of life and a haunting meditation on the high cost of duty. It is also one of the most subtle, sad, and humorous love stories ever written. It is the summer of 1956, when Stevens, a man who has dedicated himself to his career as a perfect butler in the one-time great house of Darlington Hall, sets off on a holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and, unexpectedly, into his own past, especially his friendship with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. As memories surface of his lifetime “in service” to Lord Darlington, and of his life between the wars, when the fate of the continent seemed to lie in the hands of a few men, he finds himself confronting the dark undercurrent beneath the carefully run world of his employer.
Buy the Book:
Indigo
Never Let Me Go
This unforgettable, edge-of-your-seat mystery is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.
Buy the Book:
Indigo
Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library
An Artist of the Floating World
In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II.
Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the “floating world”—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.
Buy the Book:
Indigo
Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library
When We Were Orphans
Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents’ alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.
Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one’s past.
Buy the Book:
Indigo
Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library
The Buried Giant
The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at least the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased.
The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards—some strange and other-worldly—but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.
Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.
Buy the Book:
Indigo
Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library