Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five. His eight previous works of fiction have earned him many honors around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day. To date he has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times.
His work has been translated into over 50 languages, and The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both made into acclaimed films, have each sold more than 2 million copies. He was given a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature.
The Swedish Nobel Prize Academy praised Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
The Unconsoled
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give . . .On first publication in 1995, The Unconsoled was met in some quarters with bewilderment and vilification, in others with the highest praise. One commentator asked, 'Has Ishiguro gone for greatness or has he gone mad?' Over the years, this uniquely strange and extraordinary novel about a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control has come to be seen by many as being the key work and a turning point in his career.'A masterpiece. It is above all a book devoted to the human heart.' Rachel Cusk, The Times'The most original and remarkable book he has so far produced.' New York Times Book Review'One of the strangest books in memory.' TLS'I've never read a book like it. I think it is a masterpiece.' John Carey, The Late Show
R 305.00
Nocturnes
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*In Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood Hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme - the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships founder and youthful hopes recede.'Each of these stories is heartbreaking in its own way, but some have moments of great comedy, and they all require a level of attention that, typically, Ishiguro's writing rewards.' Observer '[They] come up on you quietly, but then haunt you for days . These little pieces could only be the work of a great composer.' Evening Standard'A fine and moving collection of stories, displaying his unique combination of the sad, the stoic and the consoling. It's about failure, but it dignifies failure, and with it, the human condition.' Margaret Drabble, Guardian
R 275.00
Never Let Me Go
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*Shortlisted for the 2005 Booker PrizeKazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.'Exquisite.' Guardian'A feat of imaginative sympathy.' New York TimesWhat readers are saying:'A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking even after finishing it. 5/5 stars''I loved it, every single word of it.''It took me wholly by surprise.''Utterly beautiful.''Essentially perfect.'
R 305.00
An Artist of the Floating World
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZEWINNER OF THE WHITBREAD (NOW COSTA) BOOK OF THE YEAR1948: 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
R 305.00
Pale View of Hills
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*Kazuo Ishiguro's highly acclaimed debut, first published in 1982, tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter.Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko - a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy - the memories start to take on a disturbing cast.'A macabre and faultlessly worked enigma.' Sunday Times'One of the outstanding fictional debuts of recent years.' Observer'A delicate, ironic, elliptical novel . Its characters are remarkably convincing . but what one remembers is its balance, halfway between elegy and irony.' New York Times Book Review'An extraordinarily fine first novel . its themes are deceptively large and uncommonly haunting.' Los Angeles Times
R 305.00
Remains of the Day
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZEA 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. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past. 'A triumph . . . This wholly convincing portrait of a human life unweaving before your eyes is inventive and absorbing, by turns funny, absurd and ultimately very moving.' Sunday Times'A dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture.' New York TImes Book Review
R 305.00
When We Were Orphans
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*Shortlisted for the Booker PrizeEngland, 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
R 275.00
Buried Giant
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and other-worldly - but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another. 'A beautiful fable with a hard message at its core . . . There won't, I suspect, be a more important work of fiction published this year.' John Sutherland, The Times 'An exceptional novel . . . The Buried Giant does what important books do: it remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave.' Neil Gaiman, New York Times Book Review'A beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget.' Alex Preston, Observer
R 305.00
Klara and the Sun
*The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller**Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021**A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick*'A delicate, haunting story' The Washington Post'This is a novel for fans of Never Let Me Go . . . tender, touching and true.' The Times'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 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 world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
R 305.00
Come Rain or Come Shine
When Ray turns up to visit his old university friends Charlie and Emily, he's given a special task: to be so much his useless self that he makes Charlie look good by comparison.But Ray has his own buried feelings to contend with. Decades earlier, he and Emily would listen to jazz when they were alone, and now, as Sarah Vaughan sings through the speakers, he struggles to control everything the sound brings with it.In Kazuo Ishiguro's hands, a snapshot of domestic realism becomes a miniature masterpiece of memory and forgetting.
R 138.00
