New Release Books by Kazuo Ishiguro

A reunion with two childhood friends draws Kathy and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the English countryside, and a confrontation with the truth about their childhoods.

Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwells on the recent suicide of her elder daughter, Keiko. Despite the efforts of her surviving daughter to distract her thoughts, Etsuko finds herself recalling a particular summer in Nagasaki after the bomb fell.

'After all what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?'In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and into his past...A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.The Remains of the Day is now available as a Faber Modern Classics edition.

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD (NOW COSTA) BOOK OF THE YEAR 1948: Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his two grown daughters and his grandson, and his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past - to a life and a career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism - a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity. 'An exquisite novel.' Observer 'Pitch-perfect . a tour de force of unreliable narration.' Guardian 'A work of spare elegance: refined, understated, economic.' Sunday Times

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* Shortlisted for the Booker Prize England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Moving between London and Shanghai of the interwar years, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return. 'You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Ishiguro is the best and most original novelist of his generation and When We Were Orphans could be by no other writer. It haunts the mind. It moves to tears.' Susan Hill, Mail on Sunday 'Discloses a writer not only near the height of his powers but in a league all of his own.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

This quintet ranges from Italian piazzas to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel. Along the way we meet young dreamers, caf ̌musicians and faded stars, all at some moment of reckoning.

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In 'Klara and the Sun', Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

It is 1936 in Shanghai and into this city of political intrigue comes Sofia, a Russian Countess who, with the remains of her family, has been left stateless by the Revolution. Forced by her reduced circumstances to support herself and her family as a bar-girl and taxi dancer, Sofia forms a relationship with Jackson, a blind former diplomat who opens an elegant bar, The White Countess. Their curious relationship matures, but they are caught up in the fall of the city to the Japanese invaders.