Any new book by Kazuo Ishiguro is a cause for excitement. That especially might be the case with his eighth novel, KLARA AND THE SUN, his first since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

Ishiguro’s latest work is stunning and bittersweet, told from the point of view of Klara, an Artificial Friend (or AF). Klara, like others of her kind, is a man-made, solar-powered, realistic person, programmed to serve as a companion for privileged but lonely children and teenagers. In Klara’s near-future world (which seems nearer all the time), kids study alone at home, meeting their tutors on “oblongs” and only encountering their peers in awkward, heavily arranged social interactions engineered by their parents to equip them for college life.

"Klara herself may technically lack the ability to love, but through her actions, she both exemplifies more compassion than many of the humans in the novel and inspires new kinds of connection in the humans whose lives intersect with her own."

Klara is noteworthy for being keenly observant. When we first meet her, she has spent quite some time in a store in the big city, waiting for the right family to choose her and bring her into their home. Klara is happiest when the Manager places her in the front window --- not only because she can most directly benefit from the sun’s energy there or that the AFs in the front window stand the greatest chance of being purchased, but because this position affords her the best vantage point for observing the people and vehicles that pass by the store and trying to understand their interactions and behaviors.

Just when it might seem time to give up on her chances of being acquired --- there’s a newer and more technologically advanced model on the market, after all --- Klara is purchased, somewhat reluctantly, by the mother of Josie, a lonely and frequently ill teenager who had spotted Klara in the store window several months previously.

Klara is happy to become a part of Josie’s household; she especially enjoys observing the relationship between Josie and her best friend and neighbor Rick, though Klara (and, by extension, the reader) comes to realize that there’s some kind of rift between Rick and the rest of Josie’s college-bound peers who, like Josie, have been “lifted” (I won’t explain what that means here, since Ishiguro leaves it vague until near the novel’s end). Josie’s illness is also growing more serious, and between her mother’s bizarre requests, Klara’s discovery that Josie once had an older sister, and the family’s intermittent and somewhat mysterious trips to the city, it soon becomes apparent that Klara’s intended purpose in the household goes somewhat beyond mere companionship.

Klara is a fascinating narrator. In many ways, her powers surpass those of a human narrator (she can describe tiny details of an acquaintance’s attire after a single glance), but in others, she is quite naïve, sometimes heartbreakingly so. Through Klara, readers eventually gain an understanding of this ominous world that Ishiguro has created, one in which AI has begun stripping elite workers of their careers and prestige, and parents --- in a misguided attempt to give their children the advantages they’ll need to succeed --- have actually created a generation of pathologically lonely and unhappy individuals, unable to relate to one another.

As the novel progresses, circumstances lead Klara to consider what it is that makes a human human, and if that can ever be truly synthesized by AI. Klara herself may technically lack the ability to love, but through her actions, she both exemplifies more compassion than many of the humans in the novel and inspires new kinds of connection in the humans whose lives intersect with her own. Like Ishiguro’s previous narrators, Klara will leave an indelible mark on readers’ own memories and perhaps even the way they view our world.