Books by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro is a British author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day won him the Booker Prize in 1989.
His books have been recommended many times on Five Books.
“I absolutely love this book. It’s extraordinary. It’s essentially about memory and forgetting. It’s about terrible atrocities that have happened between different groups of people and how they can then manage to live together, and how they can break out of cycles of revenge and trauma…It’s a mistake to read historical fiction as a history lesson and I think Ishiguro absolutely does not want us to do that. His book features Gawain as a character, for instance, a mythic character. It also features a dragon, who symbolizes important themes in the book. The country is covered with a mist, which is making people forget. He is not trying to write a book that teaches us about what the period was like.” Read more...
Best Medieval Historical Fiction
Marion Turner, Biographer
“Ishiguro is one of these novelists who is writing science fiction, but it’s not science fiction as we normally encounter it. It’s not the invention of a completely different world. Instead he takes one or maybe two conceits, and then explores their consequences in a setting that is relevant and immediately relatable to normal life. His writing is always so clear, spare, and vivid—and Klara and the Sun is no exception…literature has always been about understanding what it’s like to be a person, what it’s like to have a stream of thought, to be a human, to be an individual, or to be another individual. And that’s a key part of the story. Klara and the Sun is an absolutely remarkable example of how to develop this understanding. In ways I don’t yet know, it will no doubt make me think about my own work differently.” Read more...
Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness
Anil Seth, Scientist
“For me, it’s a book that’s about the hypocrisy of adults. It’s set in a school, Hailsham, where the students are protected ‘for their own good’ from knowledge of the adult world. Information is never divulged to the students directly, but leaked to them, so that they gain slow acceptance of their fate. Even if you’re not about to get your organs harvested, I think the book accurately reflects how the adult world feels so tantalisingly close as an adolescent, and the secrecy surrounding the adult world— little snippets of it are revealed to you, but never actually discussed. There’s all this inference at play.” Read more...
The Best Boarding School Novels
Anbara Salam, Novelist
“British actor and director Dominic West gives a pitch-perfect performance as the narrator of Ishiguro’s hauntingly beautiful novel. His Mr Stevens, an ageing butler looking back upon his life in service with mounting regret, is a carefully-constructed shell of English restraint, within which tempests rage. Listening time is 7 hours and 5 minutes” Read more...
Interviews where books by Kazuo Ishiguro were recommended
Great Actors Read Great Novels
If you enjoy listening to books as audiobooks, it’s a great time to be alive. From Rosamund Pike narrating Pride and Prejudice, Jeremy Irons reading Lolita to Meryl Streep telling the story of Heartburn, many prominent actors have signed up for performing their favourite books in unabridged versions.
The best books on Enduring Love, recommended by Riz Khan
Television presenter Riz Khan chooses books on enduring love. Wuthering Heights, Remains of the Day, John Irving and Julian Barnes all make the list
The Best Campus Novels
Life in an academic institution can be a curiously intense experience. As a result, the hot-house atmosphere of a university campus or boarding school presents a fitting backdrop for novels exploring ambition, power dynamics, crushes, and sexual crises. Here, we’ve pulled together a list of campus novels that have been recommended on Five Books over the years, via our interviews with literary scholars, bestselling authors and book prize judges.
The Best Boarding School Novels, recommended by Anbara Salam
Boarding schools make great settings for novels, says Anbara Salam, author of coming-of-age drama Belladonna. The combination of immense privilege with the claustrophobia of a closed society can create an intense pressure cooker atmosphere in which characters might be forged.
The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist, recommended by Andrew M. Butler
Every year, the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award select the best of the latest batch of new scifi books. In 2022, the science fiction award’s shortlist includes new work from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel-in-verse from the Scottish writer Harry Josephine Giles, and a new title in Arkady Martine’s beloved Teixcalaan series. Andrew M. Butler, academic and chair of the judges, talks us through the finalists.
Science Fiction and Philosophy, recommended by Eric Schwitzgebel
Serious philosophy need not take the form of a journal article or monograph, argues the philosopher and U.C. Riverside professor Eric Schwitzgebel, as he selects five science fiction books that succeed both as novels and provocative thought experiments that push us to consider deep philosophical questions from every angle.
Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness, recommended by Anil Seth
Nearly every human has a sense of self, a feeling that we are located in a body that’s looking out at the world and experiencing it over the course of a lifetime. Some people even think of it as a soul or other nonphysical reality that is yet somehow connected to the blood and bones that make up our bodies. How things seem, however, is quite often an unreliable guide to how things are, says neuroscientist Anil Seth. Here he recommends five key books that led him to his own understanding of consciousness, and explores why it is that what is likely an illusion can be so utterly convincing.
Notable Novels of Spring 2021, recommended by Cal Flyn
Fiction fans can expect “an embarrassment of riches” in spring 2021, according to Cal Flyn, deputy editor of Five Books and author of the forthcoming Islands of Abandonment. From buzzed-about debuts to the latest novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, we are spoilt for choice this season.
Books by Nobel Prize in Literature Winners, recommended by Five Books Interviewees
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually since 1901 and remains one of the most prestigious prizes a writer can aspire to. It’s also been consistently international, with many novelists and writers from around the globe winning the award for books written in an array of languages. Not all are accessible, and picking out which ones to read can be a tough call. To help, here’s our list of books by winners of the Nobel literature prize that have been recommended on Five Books.
Best Medieval Historical Fiction, recommended by Marion Turner
The medieval era in Europe lasted a millennium and saw massive social change and technological innovation, as well as calamities like the Black Death. That makes it a great period for historical fiction, offering a glimpse of a past that was very different from our own lives, and yet can resonate with the present. Here Marion Turner, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, recommends some of her favourite historical novels set in the Middle Ages and explains why she finds them so compelling.