Kazuo Ishiguro Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. A Pale View of Hills (1982)
  2. An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
  3. The Remains of the Day (1989)
  4. The Unconsoled (1995)
  5. When We Were Orphans (2000)
  6. Never Let Me Go (2005)
  7. The Buried Giant (2015)
  8. Klara and the Sun (2021)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Come Rain or Come Shine (2019)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Nocturnes (2009)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Kazuo Ishiguro Books Overview

A Pale View of Hills

In his, highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro 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 then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy the memories take on a disturbing cast.

An Artist of the Floating World

In the face of the misery he saw in his homeland, the bohemian artist Masuji Ono envisioned a strong and powerful Japan of the future and put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the devastation of that war, memories of his youth and of the ‘floating world’ the nocturnal realm of leisure, entertainment, and drink offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise as an artist. Drifting in disgrace in postwar Japan, indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro is…
not only a good writer but also a wonderful novelist.’ New York Times Book Review

The Remains of the Day

The Booker Prize winning novel is now a film from Columbia Pictures starring Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving ‘a great gentleman.’ But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s ‘greatness’ and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. Michael York has performed with Britain’s National Theater as well as on Broadway. His film credits include Cabaret and The Three Musketeers. His television work includes ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ and ‘Space.’

The Unconsoled

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life. Ishiguro’s extraordinary study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification and the highest praise.

When We Were Orphans

The maze of human memory the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans, his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one’s past to determine the present. Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early twentieth century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances. The story is straightforward. Its telling is remarkable. Christopher’s voice is controlled, detailed, and detached, its precision unsurprising in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is slowly revealed what he can’t, or won’t, see: that his memory, despite what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies; that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires a child’s for his parents, a man’s for understanding may give rise to the most complicated truths.A masterful combination of narrative control and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro at his best.

Never Let Me Go

From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy now thirty one years old lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed even comforted by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood and about their lives now.A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro s finest work.

Nocturnes

One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.A once popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life…
A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him…
A struggling singer songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he’s only just met…
A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his career…
A young cellist whose tutor promises to unwrap his talent…
Passion or necessity or the often uneasy combination of the two determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, in one way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp. An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro s acclaimed works of fiction. From the Hardcover edition.

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