2021 Booker Prize Longlist: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

This thread is for discussion of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. No unhidden spoilers, please.

Such a good novel!

This one had a slow start, but once it got going, I found it to be a pretty amazing book. Klara is a cutting-edge robot designed to be a companion for humans. She comes across as very human-like, but Ishiguro is careful to also give her robotic flaws so we never stop seeing her as AI. She is bought and becomes the companion of a young girl named Josie who is suffering from some sort of illness. Since Klara is solar-powered, she is programmed to know that sun=life. Unfortunately, she has no ability to know what life actually is, or how her life is different from a human life, but she does know that the sun will help Josie, so she spends her time trying to figure out where the sun goes. I loved Never Let Go and found this one asked a lot of the same questions - what makes a human a human?

I‘m not sure about this one. The first half feels YA, the second half dystopian. Some great thoughts in between. Setting and scenery are fantastic as to be expected but in general for me it is not really memorable and not Ishiguro‘s best work. Not by a long shot.