The English Book Club: Klara and the Sun

In his eighth novel, Klara and the Sun, the Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro has created a dystopian world of the (not so distant) future in which social contact is lost, people are alienated from each other, children are home-schooled to help them overcome boredom, and their parents buy them robots, humanoid machines, artificial friends, or “AFs”, as the author calls them, which, as artificial intelligence can do, are increasingly refined and upgraded through interactions with the human race. An empty world, but one that nevertheless shows the development of a friendship between a little girl, Josie, and her AF, Klara.