Kazuo Ishiguro

"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous...

"As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules -- and teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life, and for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes an inspired sequence of stories as affecting as it is beautiful.  
 
With the clarity and precision that have become his trademarks, Kazuo Ishiguro interlocks five short pieces of fiction to create a world that resonates with emotion, heartbreak, and humor. Here is a fragile, once

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"Memorably introduced by Ishiguro himself, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain collects the lyrics of sixteen songs he wrote for world-renowned American singer Stacey Kent, which were set to music by her partner, Jim Tomlinson. An exquisite coming together of the literary and musical worlds, the lyrics are infused with a sense of yearning, melancholy, love, and the romance of travel and liminal spaces. Further exploring the notion of collaboration...

An ordinary man, reduced by years of oppressive office routine to a shadow existence, makes a supreme effort to turn his dull life into something wonderful after receiving a terminal diagnosis.

The story of blind devotion and repressed love between a fanatically proper butler and a high-spirited, strong-minded young housekeeper employed by a British lord who is unwittingly a Nazi dupe.