This is a detailed and comprehensive Kazuo Ishiguro Books in order List. It will also be a guide that has all his books plus the blurbs.
Quite deep, intriguing, and, engaging, Kazuo Ishiguro’s books are worth every dime. You should add them to your bucket list.
With eight books, Kazuo Ishiguro has won more than ten awards. Additionally, he has other works that include:
- Short Stories
- Screenplays
- Lyrics
- Short Fiction
He also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 2017 cementing his prowess in the writing arena.
Born in Nagasaki-Japan on 8th November 1954, Kazuo left Japan for England in 1960 at the age of eight years. He is now a British author.
This Kazuo Ishiguro books list will be in chronological order starting off with his first to the last book.
Images on this page have been sourced from GoodReads and other web portals.
A Pale View of Hills (1982)
We begin our Kazuo Ishiguro Books list with this fantastic and widely read novel. Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko in his critically acclaimed debut novel, “A Pale View of Hills.” She is a Japanese woman who is now living alone in England, reflecting on her daughter’s recent suicide. When she goes back in time, she finds herself reliving a hot summer in Nagasaki. During that time, she and her friends were struggling to rebuild their lives after the war. But when she thinks back on her strange friendship with Sachiko, a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy, the memories take on a disturbing hue.
An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
In the face of adversity in his homeland, Masuji Ono refused to limit his art to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, as the book narrates, he used his work to further the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. As the mature Ono struggles to recover from the war’s aftermath, memories of his youth and the “floating world”—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. He relives the passage through his personal history, indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics. This makes him both a hero and a coward, but most importantly, a human being.
The Remains of the Day (1989)
The Remains of the Day is a deeply moving portrait of the ideal English butler and his fading, isolated world in postwar England. Stevens embarks on a country drive at the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, looking back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But there are doubts in his mind about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness,” as well as graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to postwar England’s fading insular world…
The Unconsoled (1995)
Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city; he cannot recall agreeing to give a concert. But as he travels through an eerie and comical landscape—always strangely malleable, as if in a dream—he gradually realizes he is facing the most important performance of his life. Ishiguro’s extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control elicited consternation, vilification, and the highest praise upon its publication.
When We Were Orphans (2000)
The 1930s in England… Christopher Banks has become the country’s most famous detective, and his cases have become the talk of London society. But one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents when he was a child in Old Shanghai. As the world approaches total war, Banks realizes the time has come for him to return to his childhood city and finally solve the mystery. By doing so, civilization is saved from an impending disaster. When We Were Orphans, is a story of memory, intrigue, and the need to return set in the interwar years of London and Shanghai; of a childhood vision of the world surviving deep into adulthood, indelibly shaping and distorting a person’s life.
Never Let Me Go (2005)
From the Booker Prize-winning author comes an unforgettable, edge-of-your-seat mystery about what it means to be human that is both heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous. Hailsham appears to be a pleasant English boarding school away from the city’s influences. Its students are well cared for and supported, are educated in art and literature, and grow into the people the world wants them to be. However, they are taught nothing about the outside world and have little contact with it. Kathy matures from a schoolgirl to a young woman on the grounds of Hailsham. After she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the school’s safe grounds (as they always knew they would), they realize the full extent of what the school is. Never Let Me Go pushes the literary novel’s boundaries. It’s a riveting mystery, a lovely love story, and a biting critique of human arrogance. It is also a moral examination of how we treat our society’s vulnerable and different members. Ishiguro’s most moving and powerful book to date explores the themes of memory and the impact of the past, as well as the idea of a possible future.
The Buried Giant (2015)
The wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ended in post-Arthurian Britain. An elderly British couple, Axl and Beatrice, travel to see their son, whom they haven’t seen in years. And, because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they have little memory of him. Axl and Beatrice gradually begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share as they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight. The Buried Giant is a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory, an extraordinary tale of love, vengeance, and war that turns savage, suspenseful, and intensely moving.
Klara and the Sun (2021)
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara. She is an artificial friend with exceptional observational abilities who, from her position in the store, carefully observes the behavior of those who come in to browse and those who pass on the street outside. She is still hopeful that a customer will choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling novel that examines our changing world through the eyes of a memorable narrator. It also addresses the fundamental question of what it means to love. The Nobel committee described Kazuo Ishiguro’s books as “novels of great emotional force” in its 2017 award citation. They also claimed that he had discovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the rest of the world.
Editors Pick
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