Cardiff BookTalk: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Cardiff BookTalk is delighted to invite you to our event on 29 June 2022, where we will be looking at Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

It’s never easy being the protagonist of a Kazuo Ishiguro novel. In this, his first book since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, we meet Klara, an Artificial Friend, and Josie, a young girl with a mysterious illness who chooses her as a companion.

Klara might not be one of the coveted new B3s, but she’s curious and observant, and through her eyes, we piece together a dystopian world adjacent to our own—an uncanny vision of cones and rectangles, of lonely children, the Sun’s nourishment and the sinister Cootings Machine. Klara already knows that you can’t depend on a child’s promises, but her new family have secrets and Josie’s mother has her own reasons for wanting an Artificial Friend for her daughter.

Told in spare, elliptical prose, Klara and the Sun is an enigmatic science-fiction parable that explores gene-editing, societal collapse and the power of kindness, optimism and love.

Guiding us in our discussion of Klara and the Sun, Cardiff BookTalk will be welcoming two expert speaker, Dr Dominic Dean (University of Sussex) and Dr Richard Rankin Russell (Baylor University, Texas).

Each of our speakers will present a 10-15 minute talk, and then there is an opportunity for audience questions and discussion. To make the most of the session, you may like to read Klara and the Sun. Further recommended texts include Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels The Buried Giant, Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day.