Books like Klara and the Sun
What should you read after Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Kazuo Ishiguro
- 2021
- 320 pages
- Literary science fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Klara and the Sun
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchNever Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's own earlier version, and the stronger book: another narrator explaining her situation calmly, having never been given the words with which to object.
- Restraint that devastates
- What makes a person
- A narrator who misunderstands
- A human narrator, not artificial
Best for restraint that devastatesThe Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
The same author's masterpiece about a man narrating his life while entirely missing its point, and nothing in fiction is quietly sadder than the last twenty pages.
- Restraint that devastates
- A narrator who misunderstands
- Gentle, slow pacing
- No science fiction at all
Best for what makes a personExhalation
Ted Chiang
Chiang asks Klara's questions in ninety-page bursts: what a made mind owes its maker, and whether being replaceable makes anybody's love count for less.
- What makes a person
- Love and obsolescence
- Near-future realism
- Stories, not one narrative
Best for a narrator who misunderstandsPiranesi
Susanna Clarke
Another narrator of complete goodwill and badly incomplete information, describing a world he loves and does not understand. Clarke does more with considerably less.
- A narrator who misunderstands
- Gentle, slow pacing
- What makes a person
- Fantasy, not near-future
Great matchMachines Like Me
Ian McEwan
McEwan buys a synthetic human in an alternate 1982 and asks the same question about what he owes it — colder, cleverer, and considerably less moving.
- What makes a person
- Love and obsolescence
- Near-future realism
- Chillier and more argumentative
Worth a look — with a warningThe Buried Giant
Kazuo Ishiguro
The most divisive Ishiguro: an elderly couple crossing a post-Arthurian England through a fog that eats memory, at the same patient, deliberate pace.
- Gentle, slow pacing
- Love and obsolescence
- Restraint that devastates
- Ogres, knights and a dragon
What should you read after Klara and the Sun?
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro — ishiguro's own earlier version, and the stronger book: another narrator explaining her situation calmly, having never been given the words with which to object.
If what stayed with you was restraint that devastates, read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro instead: the same author's masterpiece about a man narrating his life while entirely missing its point, and nothing in fiction is quietly sadder than the last twenty pages. Exhalation by Ted Chiang is the other strong option — chiang asks Klara's questions in ninety-page bursts: what a made mind owes its maker, and whether being replaceable makes anybody's love count for less.
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