Ishiguro wanted to create a book for 5 or 6-year-olds with bright illustrations and a simple narrative.

The novel initially began life as a children’s story. “A lot of my effects come from how the narrator experiences the world, framed within the limitations of their perspective.” “The narrator is very different from me, but that’s really part of my technique,” he says. The novel, which is set in the United States at some undetermined point in the future, follows Klara throughout almost her entire life-cycle from the shop floor to life with her adopted family to her eventual “slow fade.” Quite a leap of imagination to embody a robot, I suggest.

Instead, she is an AF or “artificial friend,” a robotic being resembling a human child, designed to comfort lonely children. The eponymous narrator of Klara and the Sun is unlike any of Ishiguro’s previous narrators in that she is not human. But even so he cheerfully admits he “can’t write in the third person,” and says he finds it hardest of all to “write like myself.” Given his accomplishments, a little more self-grandiosity might be expected - a Booker Prize winner at the age of 34 for his novel The Remains of the Day (1989), he has honorary degrees from a league table of universities, and was placed in literature’s highest pantheon by the Nobel committee in 2017. Even over video chat, Ishiguro, or “Ish” as he introduces himself, is charming and self-effacing company.

Ishiguro klara