Klara is an AF (an Artificial Friend), a humanoid robot that parents, in this near-future dystopia set in the United States, buy to be company for their children. Klara, though not the most up-to-date model, is quite advanced and has been programmed to have a range of human characteristics and emotions – pity, anxiety, fear, and even possibly love. Klara is purchased to be Josie’s friend. Her duties go little further than being a companion to Josie, a sickly teenager who lives at home with her mother and Melania Housekeeper (a nice touch). When Josie’s condition starts to deteriorate, Klara pleads with The Sun to restore her with its healing powers.

Ishiguro’s imagined future is a grim one, but perhaps not much more grim than our present. It’s a place with a rigid caste system in which the “raised” are the elite, a place where the homeless still sleep in doorways and pollution still obscures the sun, and a place where children do almost everything through their “rectangles”. But Ishiguro’s main preoccupation here isn’t social commentary. It’s more to do with what distinguishes human beings in a world of increasingly clever and sentient machines. If we can programme a machine to love and to feel pity, what makes a human a human? Maybe it isn’t the capacity to love that makes us unique, but the ability to inspire love in others …

Klara and The Sun, written in that deceptively simple, crystal-clear prose familiar to anyone who knows Ishiguro’s novels, is unsettling and captivating. I’m not sure that it’s the masterpiece that many reviewers have said it is, but it’s certainly as thought-provoking as anything I’ve read for a long time.