In his first book since winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro examines human dynamics through the curious eyes of Klara, an AF, or artificial friend. This unusual narrator keeps track of people's comings and goings through the front window of the store where she's displayed, waiting to be chosen by a child, and later from within the home to which teenaged Josie takes her. Klara gains her nourishment from the sun, and strains to bathe in it, even as pollution shields it from her. She is far wiser than most AFs, and her innocence and directness combine to reveal to readers what a compassionate heart and an appreciation for the fragility of life on earth can reveal about human beings' relationship to each other and the planet.
As in Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, the characters of Klara and the Sun press against the claustrophobic world in which they exist, sometimes protected by and other times imprisoned by its borders.