Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Summary
Klara is a solar powered Artificial Friend on display in a shop window, waiting for a child to choose her in a near future America where genetically edited, or lifted, children compete for a shrinking number of university places. Josie, a sickly fourteen year old lifted for the same procedure that killed her older sister, picks Klara and brings her home, where Klara studies the household through her own earnest, limited logic. She reasons that the Sun is a conscious and generous being who directs nourishment onto the world, and she comes to believe that if she can please the Sun, it will heal Josie. Josie's mother, meanwhile, is quietly having an artist build a robotic body modeled on Josie's exact mannerisms, a body Klara slowly realizes she herself is meant to inhabit as a replacement Josie should the girl die, so that grief could be managed rather than felt. Klara strikes what she takes for a bargain with the Sun: she pours a corrosive fluid into a machine that pollutes the air and blocks the light she believes the Sun needs to heal Josie, damaging her own vision permanently in the process. Josie recovers, grows up, and leaves for college, and simply stops needing Klara the way children eventually stop needing a toy. The novel closes years later with an old, unused Klara recalling her life from a scrapyard where discarded Artificial Friends are set out in rows to fade, telling a former store manager who visits that she has no real regrets and still remembers the sun on Josie's face.
Ishiguro tells the whole book through Klara's formally polite first person voice, the same device he used for the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day and the clone narrators of Never Let Me Go, so a reader has to translate what Klara actually witnesses, jealousy, cruelty, plain neglect, into what she reports as simple observed fact. It reads quickly and plainly, almost like a story written for children, which makes the loneliness underneath it land harder rather than softer. The theology Klara builds around the Sun, equal parts sincere faith and category error, is the strangest and most affecting part of the novel, and a reader hoping for a clear verdict on whether Klara is right about any of it will not get one.
Historical Context & Significance
Faber and Faber published Klara and the Sun in the United Kingdom and Alfred A Knopf in the United States on March 2, 2021, Ishiguro's first novel since his Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 2017 for his body of work rather than for any single book. The novel made the 2021 Booker Prize longlist and went no further; that year's prize went to Damon Galgut's The Promise. It was also a nominee for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Reviewers largely read it as a continuation of the emotional territory Never Let Me Go opened. Anne Enright, writing in the Guardian, called Klara wise "like a child who decides, just for a little while, to love their doll," and Radhika Jones, in the New York Times, noted that Ishiguro again gives voice to the servant rather than the master, the clone rather than the human. Kirkus called it a haunting fable of a lonely world "entirely too plausible." The novel debuted at number six on the New York Times fiction bestseller list and appeared on Barack Obama's 2021 summer reading list.
Its screen life is still mostly ahead of it. Sony's 3000 Productions bought film rights before publication, and a film adaptation directed by Taika Waititi, with Jenna Ortega as Klara and Amy Adams as Josie's mother, was announced in 2024; BBC Radio 4 had already broadcast a ten part abridged dramatization within days of the book's first publication. Ishiguro's own major prizes, the 1989 Booker for The Remains of the Day and the 2017 Nobel, belong to his earlier work and his career overall, not to this novel, which has so far won nothing in its own right.