A big wrasse (with a friend). Agincourt Reef, the Great Barrier Reef, Far North Queensland. April 2021. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro Like Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant , Ishiguro's conceit here presents the perfect opportunity to explore some weighty and troubling themes through a fresh lens. In choosing Klara, an AI robot fresh out of the factory, as narrator, Ishiguro has a guide who is at once innocent and unworldly yet possesses outstanding observational qualities (it is what she is designed to do, after all). This gives the author access to a narrator possessing both the tabula rasa of a naïf and the vocabulary and intelligence to progress the story and complex themes engagingly and believably. I found this a better modern take on the issue than Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me . With his usual deftness of touch, Ishiguro explores what it means to be human, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the corrosive course of history as civili...