Klara and the Sun

A solar-powered 'Artificial Friend' waiting in a shop to be chosen, she studies the humans who pass with tender, methodical attention, and when a frail teenager selects her, she carries that watchfulness into a household shadowed by illness and hard choices. Kazuo Ishiguro, writing his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize, uses Klara's limited, faithful understanding to defamiliarize the human world, so that love, hope, faith and self-deception appear strange and newly visible.

As in Never Let Me Go, the science-fiction premise is quiet, almost domestic, a lens for age-old questions about what makes a person and what we owe those we love. The prose is deceptively plain, its restraint concealing real depths of feeling, and Klara's devotion becomes unexpectedly moving. Readers expecting spectacle should look elsewhere; those who want a delicate, philosophical fable about consciousness and care will find one of Ishiguro's most affecting books.