Klara is an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered android designed as a companion for a child, watching the world from a store window and hoping to be chosen. When she is finally purchased for Josie, a sick teenage girl, Klara commits herself entirely to Josie's wellbeing, observing human behavior with a naive, searching intelligence and developing her own private, quasi-religious belief that the Sun can heal the illness threatening Josie's life.
Narrated entirely by Klara in spare, careful prose, the novel filters an unsettling near-future — of genetic enhancement, social stratification, and children raised in isolation for their own protection — through the perspective of an observer who understands human cruelty and tenderness only by pattern, never by instinct. Her devotion is unwavering and her understanding is limited, and the gap between the two becomes the novel's quiet heartbreak.
Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Klara and the Sun asks what love, sacrifice, and the soul actually consist of by examining them from just outside the boundary of what counts as human.