Klara and the Sun
KAZUO ISHIGURO
(FABER &?faber, 320 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Klara is an exceptionally empathetic and observant Artificial Friend, even though she’s not the most advanced AI model available. Fourteen-year-old Josie, who thinks Klara looks cute and “kind of French”, is determined to take her home from the store. But what exactly is Klara’s role, and what does Josie’s mother have in mind for her?

Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, likes to keep his readers guessing, and solar-­powered Klara’s limited, impaired perspective as narrator (people sometimes appear to her as funnels and cones) serves this purpose well. His haunting and poignant eighth novel, the first since The Buried Giant in 2015, is full of puzzles. He originally intended it to be a children’s book, and although it reprises some of the themes of memory, mortality and the soul in Never Let Me Go (2005), it’s more benign and ultimately optimistic than that chilling story of human clones and their fate as organ donors.