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Klara and the Sun

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Klara and the Sun

Written by: Kazuo Ishiguro
Narrated by: Sura Siu
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About this listen

New York Times Best Seller

Longlisted, 2021 Booker Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Globe and Mail, Guardian, Esquire, Vogue, Time, Washington Post, The Times (UK), Vulture, The Economist, NPR, and Bookriot

On President Obama’s Summer 2021 Reading List

The magnificent new novel from Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro - author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.

“The Sun always has ways to reach us.”

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behavior 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 forever, 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?

©2021 Kazuo Ishiguro (P)2021 Knopf Canada
Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Thought-Provoking
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What the critics say

NTERNATIONAL & #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
ONE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NAMED A BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times, Time, NPR, Washington Post, Vogue, USA Today, Town & Country, The Guardian, Vulture, and more

One of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written. . . . I'll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it.” Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“For four decades now, Ishiguro has written eloquently about the balancing act of remembering without succumbing irrevocably to the past. Memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects. . . Klara and the Sun complements [Ishiguro’s] brilliant vision. . . . There’s no narrative instinct more essential, or more human.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Moving and beautiful. . . an unequivocal return to form, a meditation in the subtlest shades on the subject of whether our species will be able to live with everything it has created. . . . [A] feverish read, [a] one-sitter. . . . Few writers who’ve ever lived have been able to create moods of transience, loss and existential self-doubt as Ishiguro has — not art about the feelings, but the feelings themselves.” —The Los Angeles Times

What listeners say about Klara and the Sun

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Not bad

I thought the characters were amazingly set up and the second half of the book was super interesting and clever. But I find people who read the book finding much better emotional connection than I did, soI suspect that this book is not great for audio format.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

The story of an Artificial Doll

The story, skillfully embedded and told by a robot named Clara, touched important issues of our time.
The narrator's voice gave the impression that we heard the Artificial Friend, Clara talking. However the other characters were well defined as well.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

A Future-Tale of Artificial Friends, Lifted Children and Obsolescence

A Future-Tale of Artificial Friends, Lifted Children and Obsolescence. KLARA AND THE SUN is a riveting tale of AI, and what is it like to inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you by. It gently looks at what happens to the people who must be cast aside in order for others to move forward. It’s the kind of simply written layered read I haven’t experienced in a long, long, long time. Would join a book club just to dig in and discuss this one… and that ending?!!!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Klara and the sun

This book is written very simply but puts forward so many ideas to think about what is being human.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Thought Provoking

Love it's ❤️
Completely immersed.
left me with many discussion topics as so many modern day isses were woven into the content

The narrators voice & style drew me into the flow of the book - wonderful

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Don't read the reviews

many of the low-scoring reviewers failed to appreciate the story of this book. Their disappointment is irrelevant to the quality of the novel. Additionally, the celebration of this book as a masterpiece is misleading. Temper your expectations, this is not hard-core science fiction. The concepts explored are fascinating, but not thrilling.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Underwhelming and redundant

This book was such a disappointment. It was annoying how the author portrayed the main character. It felt like I was stuck in the head of a demented robot and couldn’t get out. I feel like the general themes of the book are quite redundant, as I’ve seen similar storylines and perspectives on the relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence play out in other forms of media. All in all I would not recommend this book it’s pretty annoying to go through, and the plot is lacklustre. Nothing really happens.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Wonderful story, so interesting.

I found the idea and character development engaging and truly enjoyed the story. It was definitely not predictable.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Could be so much more

There’s good ideas, characters, plot point, story, development…and yet it seems to lead nowhere, nothing happens, nothing concludes, nothing astonishes… it was good but I don’t understand what I read. Could have been so much more

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Disappointed

The narration made this one hard for me to assess. While the narrator’s voice was pleasant, her cadence was completely off and she emphasized the wrong word in almost every sentence. It’s possible that was deliberately done to reflect the AF’s non-human-ness, but I found it so off-putting it was all I could do to get it the end of the recording. This was compounded by the inconsistent English accent for two of the characters.

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9 people found this helpful