21Literary science fiction
Pick it up if you want a quiet, emotionally precise novel about what it means to care for someone.
Before you read
An Artificial Friend watches the world from a shop window and hopes a child will choose her.
No plot outcomes, twists, or ending details appear in this version.
Spoiler-free reading guide
Klara is an Artificial Friend, a humanlike machine built to keep a child company. In the shop where she is displayed, she watches people through the window and learns to read their moods, their gestures and the way they walk past. She is hoping to be chosen.
A teenager named Josie chooses her. In Josie's home Klara studies a family dealing with illness and with decisions about the future, and she begins to act on a private belief about the Sun, which she treats as a source of life and kindness. The story is told entirely in her first-person voice.
This is Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. It suits readers who like restrained, character-led fiction and thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence more than action. If you expect a thriller about robots, the slow, domestic pace may surprise you.
The prose is simple and precise, because Klara sees clearly but does not always understand what she sees. Readers often notice things she misses, and that gap between what she reports and what we infer is where much of the feeling comes from. The book is about 300 pages and rewards slow reading. Klara describes the world in a particular way, as if it were divided into boxes, and that small habit of her vision is a clue to how she thinks. Take your time with the early chapters in the shop, because they establish the rules that matter later.
Love and attention. Klara's devotion is expressed in what she notices and what she is willing to do about it.
What makes a person irreplaceable. The novel keeps returning to whether something about a human being cannot be copied.
Faith and hope. Klara's belief in the Sun is her way of making sense of a world she only partly understands.
Klara is the narrator, an Artificial Friend who sees the world in detailed, boxed-in images and tries hard to understand what the people near her feel. Josie is the teenager who chooses her and who is often unwell. Josie's mother, called the Mother, is loving and anxious, and her decisions drive much of the plot. Rick is Josie's close friend who lives nearby, and the Manager is the shopkeeper who watches over Klara in the store.
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan, grew up in England and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Klara and the Sun, published in March 2021, was his first novel since The Buried Giant in 2015 and returns to the quiet, memory-driven style of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. It looks at artificial intelligence through emotion rather than technology, which is why it appeals to readers who do not usually pick up science fiction.
Never Let Me Go, also by Ishiguro, shares its quiet tone and its questions about what makes a life matter. For a very different look at machines and people, try I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.