Klara and the Sun

Obviously, I won’t spoil the big reveal. But I can say that Run Rose

Run deploys every trick in the thriller manual to get there—including a baddie who laughs “maniacally” and a moment when, in a scene of especial peril in a darkened house, a sinister noise turns out to herald the entrance of a cat.

Along the way, we get plenty of genuinely interesting information about the country-music world (Dolly, incidentally, is releasing an album of songs from the book). We also get lots of impeccably down-home similes such as “skinnier than a guitar string” and “sweating like a sinner in church”.

The result is a novel that, not unlike Dolly herself, mixes commercial calculation with an irresistibly big heart. Sterner readers might notice that not everything in it is entirely plausible. Yet surely even they will be swept along by the sheer, frankly bonkers fun of the whole thing. Which only goes to show the truth of a tip that Annielee is given early on—that “shamelessness sure as hell don’t hurt”.

■ by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £8.99). A highly evolved robot is the perhaps unexpected protagonist of the latest from the Nobel-winning author of The Remains of the Day. Less unexpected are its thoughtfulness and emotional punch.