Her affectless tone is more affecting than the bullying of Josie’s male peers or even Josie’s sporadic outbursts. We lean on her centeredness and moral candor as the events of the novel spin out of control. She proves a generous guide to the complex world she was never intended to grasp. In fact, there’s nothing artificial about Klara at all. She’s confused but seeks clarity, and in this regard seems more authentic than the people around her. An awkward teenaged social known as an “interaction meeting,” a failed outing to a waterfall, a mysterious barn, Josie’s decline-all draw Klara into the maze of human affairs. The looseness of setting and action builds momentum.

Ishiguro’s world-building here is clever: we may be in the English countryside, or in North America, or even Australia. When she goes to live with them in the country, Klara bonds with Josie and learns to avoid the austere Melania Housekeeper, apparently a refugee from eastern Europe. I noticed too that when the Mother reached out to Josie from behind, the outstretched arm hesitated in the air, almost retracting, before coming forward to rest on her daughter’s shoulder. From a distance, I’d first thought her a younger woman, but when she was closer I could see the deep etches around her mouth, and also a kind of angry exhaustion in her eyes. The Mother by this time was standing right behind Josie …. Klara feels a pang of tenderness as she watches the two of them. Klara’s life changes in more ways than one when a middle-aged woman purchases her for Josie, her thin, chronically ill daughter. As the novel opens, she’s on sale in the window of an AF shop, where her almost-human traits are cultivated by the kindly Manager. The eponymous Klara is an Artificial Friend, or AF, designed to attend to the needs of teenagers a confidante-handmaiden hybrid. Teenagers slurp yogurt while playing with laptop-like devices called “oblongs ” flocks of “machine birds” fly around outside, not quite visible from the “Open Plan” living rooms indoors. As with Blade Runner, the novel is set in the near future, but with familiar details. Ishiguro poses the question of what it means to be fully human. Ridley Scott’s stylish and unnerving Blade Runner was about synthetic humans known as “replicants.” In Klara and the Sun-the first novel he’s published since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017-Kazuo Ishiguro does Scott one better with a replicant narrator straddling the line between her human and mannequin selves, dependent on the “nourishing” of an anthropomorphized Sun.

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