When We Were Orphans: Kazuo Ishiguro - Softcover

Ishiguro, Kazuo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571283888 ISBN 13: 9780571283880

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2013

Synopsis

By the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

England, the 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Moving between inter-war London and Shanghai, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.

About this title

Review:

"... I've worked hard over the years to check the spread of crime and evil wherever it has manifested itself."

Christopher Banks, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, has dedicated his life to detective work but behind his successes lies one unsolved mystery: the disappearance of his parents when he was a small boy living in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Moving between England and China in the inter-war period, the book, encompassing the turbulence and political anxieties of the time and the crumbling certainties of a Britain deeply involved in the opium trade in the East, centres on Banks's idealistic need to make sense of the world through the small victories of detection and his need to understand finally what happened to his mother and father.

This new novel, however, is the deliberate antithesis of the classic English detective story--the hermetic country-house worlds of Agatha Christie, the classic "locked room" puzzles in which order and sanity is restored at the story's end. Ishiguro mimics the functional style and clipped speech patterns of the genre, ironising its reliance on melodrama and stereotype, while developing a narrative of subtlety, great emotional depth, and political and cultural acuity: what we get is a negative image of classic detective fiction, in which the solved crimes are mentioned in passing and the real mystery is played out in the psychology of the detective himself. The act of detection, Ishiguro suggests, is one we all perform on our own past, struggling to marshal clues and evidence whilst trying to construct the story of ourselves; the one mystery Banks seems unable to solve is his own.

If Ishiguro's concerns as a writer remain broadly the same as in previous novels such as his Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day--the complexities, instability and elusiveness of memory, dramatised through a first-person narrator--this new book shows how flexible and powerful the form has become for him. Banks' quest is both deeply personal and resonantly emblematic of us all:

...for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

When We Were Orphans is an astonishing book, rich and profound on many levels, and one that will live clearly in the memory of all who read it. --Burhan Tufail

Review:

Ishiguro is the best and most original novelist of his generation, and When We Were Orphans could be by no other writer. It haunts the mind. It moves to tears. -- Susan Hill, Mail on Sunday

When We Were Orphans discloses a writer not only near the height of his powers but in a league all of his own. -- Boyd Tonkin, Independent

You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction. -- John Carey, Sunday Times

His fullest achievement yet. -- Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review

An imaginative work of surpassing intelligence and taste. -- Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0571283888
• ISBN 13: 9780571283880
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320