Klara and the Sun: an AI narrator who triages better than most people I work with

Klara is a solar powered AF, artificial friend, sitting in a store window observing the street and the people who pass, waiting to be chosen. She gets picked by a girl named Josie who is sick in a way the book doesn’t explain right away and doesn’t need to, and Klara goes home with her to be a companion, a caretaker, something closer to family than either of those words quite covers. The whole thing is told through Klara’s perspective, and Ishiguro does this deliberate thing where her understanding of the world is partial, sometimes literally, her vision breaks into grid boxes when she’s overloaded, and you’re piecing together the actual stakes of Josie’s illness through what Klara notices and what she doesn’t.

My triage read on the premise going in was skeptical, I’ve had my fill of sentimental robot narrators. Klara isn’t sentimental, she’s methodical, almost clinical in how she watches and calculates and tries to bargain for Josie’s health, and something about that read as deeply familiar to me, that instinct to keep watching vitals, keep gathering data, keep trying to find the intervention that changes the outcome even when you’re not sure one exists. There’s a section involving the Sun as something closer to a deity in Klara’s worldview that could have tipped into precious and somehow doesn’t, because Ishiguro keeps the prose so restrained.

This is not a downtime clock book, for what it’s worth, the chapters are longer and the payoff is slow and if you only get six minutes at a stretch you’ll lose the thread of Klara’s internal logic. I read most of it on a rare two nights off in a row, straight through mostly, and I needed real debrief time after, sat with it a full day before I could talk about it without getting quiet. Five stars. It’s the best thing I’ve read this year and I don’t say that lightly.