Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend, watches the world from a shop window and hopes a family will choose her, in a gentle, quietly sad novel by the same author.
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Books like Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go, by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, looks back on a childhood at an English boarding school and the friendships formed there. These seven books share its quiet, reflective tone or its unsettling worlds.
Books to read next
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
An English butler takes a motoring trip in 1956 and looks back on a lifetime of service in a great house, in a restrained novel about duty and regret.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
In a future state where people are conditioned from birth to be content, an outsider questions the price of that comfort, in a classic dystopia.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
In a theocratic regime that has stripped women of their rights, a woman is assigned as a handmaid to a powerful household, in a chilling novel that includes sexual violence.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Years after a pandemic collapses society, a traveling Shakespeare company crosses a changed world, in a literary novel that moves between timelines.
The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa
On an island where objects keep vanishing from the world and from memory, a young novelist hides her editor from the authorities, in a hushed, eerie novel.
Atonement
Ian McEwan
A young girl's actions on one hot summer day in 1935 England change several lives for good, in a literary novel of guilt and memory with war scenes.
How to choose
Ishiguro's own novels are the closest match. Klara and the Sun has the same gentle voice, and The Remains of the Day is the classic of restraint, told by a narrator who says little about what he feels. For other worlds seen up close, Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale are the classic dystopias, though The Handmaid's Tale includes sexual violence. Station Eleven pairs a bleak setting with art and friendship, and The Memory Police is hushed and strange. Atonement suits readers who want literary fiction about memory and guilt. These books are mostly slow, so they reward patience over speed. If you haven't read Never Let Me Go yet, stay away from reviews and summaries: it is best read knowing as little as possible.
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