Reading Order
Klara and the Sun Reading Order
Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) is the Nobel laureate's most recent novel — narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend (a humanoid solar-powered robot designed as a companion for children), who observes the human world around her with perfect visual acuity but imperfect understanding. As Klara watches and waits, she becomes devoted to Josie, the teenage girl who has chosen her from the store window, and makes a decision about Josie's fate that challenges everything the novel has established about what it means to love and be known.
Where to start
Klara and the Sun
Complete Klara and the Sun Book List
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Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro·2021·Stand-alone — no prior Ishiguro required, though Never Let Me Go (2005) is often read alongside it as a companion novel about artificial beings and what it means to be human.
Klara and the Sun — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Klara and the Sun similar to Never Let Me Go?
Klara and the Sun is the Ishiguro novel most often compared to Never Let Me Go — both are narrated by a being who has been created to serve others and who narrates with a kind of gentle, oblivious acceptance of their own circumstances that the reader finds heartbreaking. Both are dystopian in a quiet, understated way. But they are formally and emotionally quite different: Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go is a human clone narrating her own childhood and adult life; Klara is a robot narrating her observations of others. Klara's perspective is externalized where Kathy's is internalized.
How does Klara and the Sun fit in Kazuo Ishiguro's reading order?
Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro's most recent novel and his eighth. Most readers come to it after The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005), which are his most widely read. The reading order that best prepares you for Klara and the Sun is: The Remains of the Day → Never Let Me Go → Klara and the Sun, which traces Ishiguro's developing interest in the theme of devotion and its costs across three different formal and genre registers.
What is Klara's relationship to the Sun in the novel?
Klara is solar-powered, and she has developed what amounts to a devotional relationship to the Sun — she believes the Sun is a conscious, caring entity whose favor can be sought and whose gifts can heal. The novel is in part about Klara's equivalent of religion: she makes a bargain with the Sun on Josie's behalf, and the novel explores what it means for a being of pure observation to develop a faith. Ishiguro has spoken about Klara's solar religion as the novel's way of exploring the nature of devotion itself, divorced from any specific theological content.
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