Kazuo Ishiguro’s rich meditation on love and morality

Klara and the Sun. By Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf; 320 pages; $28. Faber £20

IN “THE BURIED GIANT”, published in 2015, an elderly couple make a perilous journey through a war-ravaged post-Arthurian Britain, a land mysteriously afflicted by widespread amnesia. Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s slippery allegory about the aftermath of conflict, and the value of forgetting as well as remembering, confounded some critics. It was seen as a puzzling left-turn into fantasy—a tag the author rejected, prompting accusations that not only had he raided a downmarket genre, he had done so ungraciously.

These arguments fell away when Sir Kazuo, now 66, won the Nobel prize for literature in 2017 (he was knighted two years later). But they may resurface now that he has turned to science fiction—or rather turned back to it, following his boarding-school dystopia “Never Let Me Go” (2005), which contemplated human cloning. Set in an overheated, rigidly stratified America, “Klara and the Sun”, his first post-Nobel novel, is a coming-of-age tale in which sophisticated solar-powered androids—entirely human in appearance and known as AFs, or Artificial Friends—are purchased by wealthy parents as company for their offspring. These children are taught remotely via smartphones and are genetically modified, or “lifted”, in a...