Kazuo Ishiguro

“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

“I love this book. This is told from the point of view of an ‘artificial friend.’ Klara is a robot who’s conscious, sentient—a person—who is designed to be a companion to a wealthy disabled girl. Her whole purpose is to be as good a companion as possible to this girl, Josie. Ishiguro is brilliant in giving you the world through the eyes of Klara. It’s a very meditative, reflective book.” Read more...

The best books on Science Fiction and Philosophy

Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher

“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

“Remains of the Day is such a fantastically insightful study into the British character. This very British butler who doesn’t know what to make of change, being so rigidly adherent to his upbringing and he never gets to realise his true love. It’s all done in flashback so that we meet him going to visit her, the woman he loves, and he’s excited because finally now, after all this time, they might have the chance to be together, and he’s looking back at how he has been hurt by being who he is. And they meet, but there isn’t a love interest and nothing happens and he is sitting on a bench by the sea realising that he’s facing the remains of his day. It’s about missed chances and what the British character does to a person’s emotions. There is this brick wall that they can’t crack through and after a while a bit of the grout wears away and there is a chink to peer through, but it’s too late.” Read more...

The best books on Enduring Love

Riz Khan, Journalist