Klara and the Sun

Klara is an Artificial Friend, solar-powered and unusually observant, who spends the opening chapters in a shop window learning about people from what passes on the street. She is eventually bought as a companion for Josie, a teenager with an unexplained illness.

In the house Klara watches a set of adult arrangements she does not fully understand: Josie's mother, an absent father, a neighbour boy, and a series of appointments and portraits whose purpose becomes clear only late. Ishiguro withholds almost everything and lets implication do the work.

Klara's own project runs alongside it. She has concluded, from limited evidence, that the Sun has particular powers and can be petitioned, and she acts on that belief with total sincerity. What the novel does with that belief is the reason people find it moving rather than twee.

Sura Siu's performance is the entire experience. She reads Klara with a flat, courteous precision — every sentence polite, every observation slightly off-centre — and she never once asks you to feel sorry for her.

That restraint is what makes the book work in audio. When Klara misreads a scene that the listener understands perfectly, the gap between her calm report and the obvious truth is far more affecting than a warmer reading would allow.

Her human characters are deliberately thin, filtered through Klara's limited model of people: the mother is clipped, Josie is bright and inconsistent, the housekeeper is cold. Nobody is fully rounded, because Klara cannot round them.

The shop-window opening is the most engaging section, partly because Klara's observations are novel and partly because there is a clear want driving it.

The long middle in the house is where listeners drift. The same domestic scenes circle for hours, and information arrives in single mild clauses. If you want momentum, this section will feel airless.

The final two hours reframe most of what came before and include the book's one genuinely devastating scene. The last ten minutes are among the best endings in recent literary fiction.

This is the least forgiving title on our shelf for distracted listening. Crucial plot information is frequently a subordinate clause inside a polite sentence, and if your mind wanders for sixty seconds you can miss the point of a chapter.

It is a poor choice for noisy commutes, gym sessions or background listening while working. We would recommend it for quiet evening listening only.

Rewinding is common and not a failure of the production. Ishiguro is deliberately withholding, and the audio format gives you no page to glance back at.

If you need pace and event, the middle third will defeat you. Very little happens, on purpose.

Readers expecting science fiction in the conventional sense should adjust expectations: the technology is background, and the book is uninterested in explaining how any of it works.

If you liked Never Let Me Go you already know whether this is for you — it is the same restraint applied to a narrator who understands even less than the reader.