Klara and the Sun ,by Kazuo Ishiguro (Allen & Unwin, $36.99)

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Leave it to Kazuo Ishiguro to articulate our inchoate anxieties about the future we’re building. His first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 is a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope.

Klara, the narrator of this genre-straddling novel, is an Artificial Friend (AF), a popular class of androids designed to provide companionship to teenagers. Why young people would need artificial companionship is one of the chilling questions that Ishiguro raises but postpones so naturally that the horror feels almost incidental.

The real power of this novel is Ishiguro’s ability to embrace a whole web of moral concerns about how we navigate technological advancements, environmental degradation and economic challenges, even while dealing with the unalterable fact that we still die.

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