Klara and the Sun

Some serious Never Let Me Go vibes and an underlying current of anxiety that pervades the story. This future world finds 14-year-old Josie on tenuous ground after being “lifted”. There is the very real possibility that she might succumb to the treatment and there is this looming sense of impending loss. Klara, an AF or Artificial Friend, enters the picture to be Josie's companion and eagerly observes the world she now finds herself in.

And that's it. That's all I can talk about without spoiling the book really. Because I want to get into a discussion about how existentially dark AF this book is. About how it examines class structure and is a sharp reflection of the current dystopian hellscape we live in. How parents must face their own obsolescence while making life or death decisions for their children, and the complicated and often implicating motives therein. How we all end up on our own. Ishiguro may be a master of restraint but this thing has teeth, hovering at the periphery of this otherwise sunny, affectless, robot-narrated remembrance.

...and he dedicated the book to his late mother.