Recommendations
Books Like The Buried Giant
Best books to read after The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant is the Nobel laureate's literary fantasy — post-Arthurian Britain, a mist that erases memory, an elderly couple's journey. These recommendations continue the Ishiguro canon, explore the tradition of literary fantasy and the Arthurian novel, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the book about what happens when a community chooses to forget the violence that made its peace possible.
- 1Buy
The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The essential companion Ishiguro — Stevens, the English butler, reckoning with the choices he made in service to an aristocrat who turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer; shares The Buried Giant's central question of whether suppressing a difficult truth is ever the right choice, and what the suppression costs.
- 2Buy
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The companion Ishiguro in the tradition of characters who know and don't know the truth about their situation — Kathy H. and her friends at Hailsham, raised as organ donors; the Ishiguro novel that most directly parallels The Buried Giant's use of a genre surface (dystopia, fantasy) to explore his characteristic themes of suppression and loss.
- 3Buy
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The most recent Ishiguro — Klara the Artificial Friend observing the human world with perfect clarity and imperfect understanding; shares The Buried Giant's interest in what is seen and what is unseen, and in the dignity of lives lived under constraint.
- 4Buy
The Once and Future King
by T.H. White
The definitive literary retelling of Arthurian legend — White's four-part novel about Arthur from boyhood to the dissolution of the Round Table; the essential companion for readers of The Buried Giant who want to understand the Arthurian tradition that Ishiguro is working in and against.
- 5Buy
Le Morte d'Arthur
by Thomas Malory
The original Arthurian source — Malory's fifteenth-century compilation of the Arthurian romances, the text that established the canonical English version of the legend Ishiguro engages in The Buried Giant; for readers who want to understand the tradition from its foundation.
- 6Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
The British literary fantasy companion — Clarke's alternate history of English magic in the Napoleonic era, a novel as serious in its themes as its playful surface suggests; the closest British literary fantasy to The Buried Giant in ambition and the quality of its prose.
- 7Buy
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
The contemporary British literary fantasy companion — a man living in a labyrinthine house of infinite halls and tides, narrating a world he only partly understands; shares The Buried Giant's use of a mysterious, semi-allegorical landscape to explore questions of memory, knowledge, and what we know and don't know about ourselves.
- 8Buy
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
The medieval European literary companion — Brother William of Baskerville investigating murders in an Italian monastery in 1327, a novel about knowledge, heresy, and the history suppressed by the powerful; shares The Buried Giant's interest in a medieval setting and in what happens when forgotten or suppressed knowledge resurfaces in a community.
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