The story opens in a department store that sells AFs and here we meet Klara, a solar-powered, fourth series, B2, Artificial Friend who serves as the narrator of the book. Of course, this ensures that the children will outgrow their AFs, a situation that doesn’t raise any concern until we get to know Klara, the AF at the center of this story. To address the lonely lives of children in this world parents purchase Artificial Friends (AFs) to shepherd them through their teenage years until they go to college (which still seems to be a residential experience). She lives with her mother who is rarely home and Melania Housekeeper. They learn remotely using “oblongs.” Josie is one of those children-a 14-year old teenager. Children spend most of their time at home. It is a future in which pollution often darkens the sky for days on end, adults are largely “post-employed”, and a caste system is firmly in place with those who have been “lifted” as the only ones eligible to be in the highest caste. The story takes place in the United States in the not-so-distant future. Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro’s newest novel, his eighth, and first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.
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