From the Bookshelf of The Roundtable…

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

Start date: August 1, 2025

Finish date: September 15, 2025

Discussion: 2025 Tournament

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2025 Tournament

Round E voting - 15 September
By Henk · 11 posts · 12 views

last updated 23 hours, 40 min ago

Round E - 1 August - 15 September - Reservoir 13 vs Klara and the Sun vs Headshot
By Henk · 14 posts · 19 views

last updated Sep 09, 2025 10:49PM

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What Members Thought

Jun 16, 2020 Henk rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

Human callousness and the cruelty of forgetting and changing. All captured in a near future America with some very faint glimmers of hope intertwined
“Sometimes,’ she said, ‘at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness. I’m glad you watch everything so carefully, Klara.”

One does not read Kazuo Ishiguro his works for literary fireworks on a sentence level. This is especially true for Klara and the Sun, told from the perspective of a ...more

494 likes · Like · see review

Mar 29, 2021 Lark Benobi rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2021, uk, male-identified-authors

I'm not a fan of Ishiguro's restraint. It bothered me a lot in The Remains of the Day where it began to feel mannered and even a little childish to withhold so much personality and emotional demonstrativeness from the character of Stevens. But I don't think it's necessarily a flaw that Ishiguro doesn't explain everything, and that he sticks with one very limited point of view throughout this newest novel.

BUT I do feel the flatness of the tone in this novel, and the limited point of view--along ...more

140 likes · Like · see review

Mar 23, 2021 Nadine in California rated it really liked it

I’ve been mesmerized by the trope of AI in uncannily real female form ever since I discovered Sonmi-451 in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. It’s a trope that’s been exploited in the worst ways, so finding it done with psychological and philosophical depth is my holy grail. The only examples I can remember are The Windup Girl and the films Blade Runner and Ex Machina. So what a thrill to find out that Ishiguro has taken this on!

Klara is a marvelous character and narrator - simple and precise in her I’ve been mesmerized by the trope of AI in uncannily real female form ever since I discovered Sonmi-451 in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. It’s a trope that’s been exploited in the worst ways, so finding it done with psychological and philosophical depth is my holy grail. The only examples I can remember are The Windup Girl and the films Blade Runner and Ex Machina. So what a thrill to find out that Ishiguro has taken this on!

Klara is a marvelous character and narrator - simple and precise in her language, wise yet naive in her thinking. She even develops her own theology, unbeknownst to the other characters. Klara is programmed to be an ‘AF’ (Artificial Friend) to a child, and she is an exceptionally observant one, able to interpret the nuances of human emotion. Ishiguro strikes a very fine balance in Klara, never letting the reader forget that she is a machine, even while her (programmed) devotion to Josie leads her into territory that is hard to distinguish from emotion.

While Klara is such a fully realized and complex character, the flesh and blood humans were more of a problem for me, particularly the teenagers Josie and Rick, whose dialogue seemed stilted and unnatural. The adults fared a little better, except for Rick’s mother, Helen, who I can only think of as a robot on the fritz, compiled from bad romance novels. Fortunately, Klara is present at every moment of the novel, eclipsing everyone and making the book a revelation.

Update: I keep thinking about the humans in the novel, and that Ishiguro made them this way for purposes I can't see. So I'll keep coming back to my review with more thoughts about them like....

Maybe the awkwardness of Josie and Rick's dialogues are because they are filtered through Klara, thus reminding us that Klara is a machine? Although as a sophisticated machine with such finesse at interpreting human emotion shouldn't Klara be able to record and relay human dialogue naturally? Or maybe Josie and Rick don't speak in a way I'd consider 'natural' because they haven't been socialized to do it? Although I don't remember conversations at the 'party' at Klara's house sounding that oddly formal? Or......

The one thought I keep coming back to is that the human characters' awkwardness with emotional attachments, to Klara and to each other, and their inability to talk to each other in a flowing, natural way may be because AI's encroachment into all aspects of their world has drastically reduced their opportunities to socialize naturally and 'learn' to be human together - at work, at home or at school. For me, it's like they're performing being human from a dimly remembered, faulty script. It's so jarring that Klara performs being human so much more naturally than they do.

I've really missed the boat on Helen, who embarrasses everyone (especially Rick) by saying the quiet parts out loud about their 'brave new world'. At one point she asks Klara something like 'should I treat you like a person or a vacuum cleaner?'. Helen can't adapt herself to a society of 'lifted' children (I didn't notice the play on 'gifted' till just now!), Artificial Friends, and AI replacing humans at work. It's no wonder her mental balance is off. ...more

27 likes · Like · see review

Mar 26, 2021 Camelia Rose rated it it was amazing

Shelves: artificial-intelligence, science-fiction, dystopia

During the Zoom book tour I attended, Kazuo Ishiguro told the origin of Klara and the Sun. It began as a short story for small children. When he ran the idea with his adult daughter, she disagreed--the ending was just too sad. Even though I came prepared, the emotional impact I felt in the end still took me by surprise.

The story is narrated by Klara, a robot, whose voice is childlike but also insightful. The voice is convincing, and it keeps me hooked.

(view spoiler) During the Zoom book tour I attended, Kazuo Ishiguro told the origin of Klara and the Sun. It began as a short story for small children. When he ran the idea with his adult daughter, she disagreed--the ending was just too sad. Even though I came prepared, the emotional impact I felt in the end still took me by surprise.

The story is narrated by Klara, a robot, whose voice is childlike but also insightful. The voice is convincing, and it keeps me hooked.

(view spoiler) ...more

18 likes · Like · see review

May 04, 2025 Pamela rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audible

This book appears to bring together some of the themes that has preoccupied Ishiguro in other works - scientific and technological advance such as genetic treatments, artificial intelligence and cloning in confrontation with the inconsistency of human behaviour and emotion. Yet for me it was a little sketchier and less powerful than, for example, Never Let Me Go.

Klara is an artificial friend (AF) who is chosen by Josie, a gifted teenager who lives with her mother and a housekeeper in an isolate ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Jun 06, 2025 Erika rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-science-fiction, fiction-apocalyptic-and-dystopic, fiction-troubling

Wrong book at the wrong time. If you’re gloomy about the arrival of AI, or about the moral implications of gene editing, then this book will not so much sing to you as shout at you. I am uncomfortable with both and held my breath (and possibly my nose) the entire time I read this book. It’s well written, of course; Ishiguro delivers. But it’s Never Let Me Go, rather than The Unconsoled, and I vastly prefer the latter.

2 likes · Like · see review

Nov 05, 2022 Irene rated it liked it

Klara is an “artificial friend”, a human-like robot whose artificial intelligence allows it to function as a friend and servant to adolescents. Klara narrates the world as her algorithms interpret it. The importance of relationships in self-understanding and individual value are at the heart of this story. Klara’s voice was engaging, even when there felt like there were inconsistencies. The story line fell a bit flat for me.

1 like · Like · see review

Apr 21, 2025 Dawn rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, read-2025, audiobook, did-not-finish, literary-fiction

I read this as part of a book group and never would have picked it up on my own. Ishiguro just isn’t my kind of author. I gave it a fair shot, but the story felt flat and the tone emotionally distant. Klara, the robot narrator, was more irritating than endearing, overly sentimental and oddly vacant. The pacing dragged, and I never found a reason to stay engaged. Just not for me.

1 like · Like · see review