As with Never Let Me Go, one of the enormous pleasures of Klara and the Sun is the way Ishiguro only drip-feeds to the reader hints and suggestions about the shape of this futuristic world, the reasons for its strangeness. Klara is chosen by Josie, a fragile young woman who we soon learn has an illness that may kill her as it killed her sister. Klara is an AF – an Artificial Friend – androids bought by parents to provide companionship for their teenage children, who, for reasons that become clearer over the course of the book, are home-schooled by “screen professors” in the novel’s polluted and anxious future America. This is a book – a brilliant one, by the way – that feels very much of a piece with Never Let Me Go, again exploring what it means to be not-quite-human, drawing its power from the darkest shadows of the uncanny valley. With Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel, though, it feels like Ishiguro is bringing that dirty secret slightly more into the light. It seemed a particularly ludicrous statement from a writer who had just followed a clone romance ( Never Let Me Go) with an Arthurian epic ( The Buried Giant). “I tend to write the same book over and over,” he said. I n a 2015 interview with the Guardian, Kazuo Ishiguro revealed what he claimed was his “ dirty secret”: that his novels are more alike than they might initially seem.
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