KAZUO ISHIGURO's seven previous books have won him wide renown and numerous honors. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have sold more than one million copies, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films.
“If forced at knife-point to choose my favourite Ishiguro novel,
I’d opt for The Buried Giant. It uses the tropes of
fantasy to set up a smoke-screen which the book then, by twists and
turns, dispels. This reveal gives the book a shadow-plot, and
layers of mystery . . . An ideas-enabler, a metaphor-animator.”
—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone
Clocks
“Completely astonishing. I can't think of another writer who keeps
finding such new and radically unexpected ways of
exploring—and deepening—his lifelong concerns. Which is a way of
saying that I can't think of another writer who's so unswervingly
serious, as well as impeccable, stripping away every distraction to
get to the core of things, as a Beckett might, and attaining in the
end an almost unbearable intensity of emotional
directness.”
—Pico Iyer, author of The Art of
Stillness and The Lady and the Monk
“The Buried Giant does what important books do: It remains in the
mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to
turn it over and over . . . Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge,
personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the
tools to do it. The Buried Giant is an exceptional
novel.”
—Neil Gaiman, The New York Times Book Review
“Ishiguro is a brilliant novelist, a born novelist. . . . Inside
his work, you feel it, that thrilling thing: a writer doing
something actually different, something actually new. . . . [The
Buried Giant] creates an entire field of unspoken meaning,
illuminating the kind of elusive truths about love, time, death and
memory that other novelists have to strain even to brush. . . .
That’s the magic of true art. . . . When one day we send some
unmanned capsule into the nameless depths of space to give and
account of ourselves, it’s [Ishiguro’s] books I would include on
our behalf.”
—Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune
“Ishiguro is one of Britain’s best living novelists . . .
Magnificent and heartbreaking . . . Of all writers working in the
early 21st century, he will turn out to be the one who
persisted—who went on asking questions about what binds people to
one another; who said something profound about history, and
something unsentimental about love.”
—Gaby Wood, The Telegraph (London)
“The weirdest, riskiest and most ambitious thing he’s published in
his celebrated 33-year career.”
—Alexandra Alter, The New York Times
“Ishiguro works this fantastical material with the tools of a
master realist. . . . [He] makes us feel its sheer grotesque
monstrosity with a force and freshness that have been leached away
by legions of computer-generated orcs. . . . He keeps a straight
face, but Ishiguro has fun with the swords and sorcery: he’s a
lifelong fan of samurai manga and westerns, and some of the action
has the feel of a classic showdown scored by Ennio Morricone.”
—Lev Grossman, Time magazine
“Ishiguro is in full genre-occupying mode here, settling an
imaginative region, capturing its tropes and conditions, and
establishing within it his own peculiar sovereignty. . . . For all
that The Buried Giant clothes itself in the armor of
chivalric romance and fantasy, it is also subtly using these formal
structures to subvert from within the kinds of national mythologies
that are so often built around them. . . . Devastating . . . as
emotionally ruinous an ending as any I’ve read in a very long time,
and it made me circle back to the opening pages, to re-enter
the strange mist of this sad and remarkable book.”
—Mark O’Connell, Slate
“[The Buried Giant is] a profound examination of memory and guilt,
of the way we recall past trauma en masse. It is also an
extraordinarily atmospheric and compulsively readable tale, to be
devoured in a single gulp. The Buried Giant is Game
of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the Stone for
the age of the trauma industry, a beautiful, heartbreaking book
about the duty to remember and the urge to forget.”
—Alex Preston, The Guardian (London)
“Lifetimes of myth, allegory, and epic discoveries are contained
within . . . In this as with Ishiguro’s previous fiction, the
mesmerizing prose ensures that the pages will turn swiftly. Without
a doubt, Giant is Ishiguro’s most complex book thus far, managing
to combine elements of Edenic epic, Roman myth, Arthurian quest,
Tolkien fantasy, philosophical ruminations, religious dialectics,
literary experimentation, and more to create an exquisitely
rendered, albeit disturbing love story set against the unresolved
threat of war—past and future both. . . . Ishiguro’s 10-year
investment comes to eloquent fruition here. The result is a
provocative, multilayered mosaic.”
—Terry Hong, The Christian Science Monitor
“Ishiguro is a master of the uncanny. . . . Few write about the
mysteries of the human experience with such grace as Ishiguro, and
his prodigious gifts are evident throughout the novel. . . . The
Buried Giant transcends the boundaries of a conventional fantasy
novel. At its core, it is a tender story about marriage, memory and
forgiveness, the tale of an elderly couple who set off to find a
half-remembered son. And the questions that emerge in the course of
their journey—as they contend with pixies and Saxon warriors,
devious boatmen and duplicitous monks, as they begin to recall a
past they might be better off forgetting—cut to the heart of the
life’s mystery.”
—Michael David Lukas, San Francisco Chronicle
“A spectacular, rousing departure from anything Ishiguro has ever
written, and yet a classic Ishiguro story . . . The Buried Giant
has the clear ring of legend, as graceful, original and humane as
anything Ishiguro has written. . . . All the same, I’ll wager
you won’t soon forget this book after turning its last pages. The
close, in particular, will haunt.”
—Marie Arana, The Washington Post
“Yet for all its flights of fantasy and supernatural happenings . .
. The Buried Giant is absolutely characteristic, moving and
unsettling, in the way of all Ishiguro’s fiction. . . . A novel of
imaginative daring that, in its subtleties of tone, mood and
reflection, could be the work of no other writer. . . . In the
manner of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ishiguro has created a
fantastical alternate reality in which, in spite of the extremity
of its setting and because of its integrity and emotional truth,
you believe unhesitatingly. . . . Even after you have finished the
book, many days later, you find you can’t stop thinking about
it.”
—Jason Cowley, Financial Times
“Mr. Ishiguro’s work is never simple. He has always been a
trickster, a shape-changer, courageously exploring the novel’s
form, and this new book is no exception. His language is plain and
clear. But the stories he tells with his clean words are powerful
and disturbing. . . . No doubt this book will divide opinion
powerfully: but it provokes strong emotions—and lingers long in the
mind.”
—The Economist
“The story sweeps us in not through the imagination of its monsters
and magic mists, but by a prose style so distinctive that
everything it touches, however airy . . . becomes earthly, solid,
with an emotional purchase usually reserved for the ‘real.’ . . .
This is a novel that does not answer every question it raises about
war, love, memory; but it doesn’t have to. It takes us on a journey
that is as deep as it is mesmerizing, ogres an’ all.”
—Arifa Akbar, The Independent (London)
“Hallucinatory . . . subtle and complex . . . At the heart
of The Buried Giant, luminous amid all the dragons and warring
knights, is a deeply affecting portrait of marital love. . . . A
power and a strangeness that are, in the Shakespearean sense of the
word, weird . . . For all the deconstruction The Buried
Giant performs on its manifold sources and inspirations, the
ultimate measure of Ishiguro’s achievement is that his novel is
more than worthy to take its place alongside them. The quest
undertaken by Axl and Beatrice is not merely a search for their
son, but one that follows in the footsteps of Sir Gawain,
and Tennyson’s King Arthur, and Frodo.”
—Tom Holland, The Guardian (London)
“The prose, as in many of Ishiguro’s novels, is lapidary and
beguiling, suggestive of secrets to be disclosed. . . . For
Ishiguro, our poet laureate of loss, the mercies of forgetfulness
hold the greater fascination . . . The Buried Giant is ultimately a
story about long love and making terms with oblivion. It is an
eerie hybrid: a children’s fable about old age. In Ishiguro’s
novel, as in life, love conquers all—all, that is, but death.”
—Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic
“Ishiguro is, as ever, very readable . . . the novel is moving and
strangely resonant. I suspect him of being wise, of having a vision
that subtly and politely exceeds that of ordinary people . . .
Ultimately the novel achieves a tragic synthesis between its
various parts that . . . that reverberates powerfully in the
mind.”
—Theo Tait, Sunday Times (London)
“What Ishiguro has delivered, after much labour, is a beautiful
fable with a hard message at its core . . . there won’t, I suspect,
be a more important work of fiction published this year than The
Buried Giant. And take note, Peter Jackson. Ishiguro’s fiction
makes wonderful films.”
—John Sutherland, The Times (London)
“Kazuo Ishiguro has written his riskiest novel yet. . . . The
Buried Giant actually feels very modern—despite all its talk
of ogres, warriors, and dragons. It reprises the same themes
Ishiguro has dealt with his entire career: deeply flawed people
grappling with dueling impulses and loyalties—to their ideals,
identities, and nations. . . . These questions of identity and
conflict lie at the heart of The Buried Giant, and they
are gripping, tangled, and well worth the attention of so talented
a novelist. . . . Lush and thrilling, rolling the gothic,
fantastical, political, and philosophical into one. In its best
moments, the fantasy elements blend with the exploration of memory,
identity, and power to significant effect. The Buried
Giant may feel very different from Ishiguro’s previous works,
but the concerns that lie at its heart have preoccupied him his
entire career.”
—Elaine Teng, The New Republic
“Ishiguro is a deft gut-renovator of genres, bringing fresh life
and feeling to hollowed-out conventions. . . . It’s a bold
departure: highly stylized, alternately stiff and swashbuckling.
But the love story at its center shimmers with a mythic and
melancholy grace.”
—Boris Kachka, Vulture
“A literary event . . . A story that’s both one couple’s
on-the-road tale, and a mystery for a great civilization.”
—NPR
“Ishiguro may be a master of his craft, but, more than that, he’s a
master of quiet subversion. . . . What you see is rarely, if ever,
what you get: the writer expects you to dig deeper for the
truth.”
—Caroline Goldstein, Bustle
“Just as in Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro takes us into a
disconcertingly different world without ever making that world the
main focus of attention . . . The Buried Giant tells us that for
nations, just as for individuals, there may be some memories so
painful and damaging that they are dangerous to face, that some
forgetfulness may be necessary . . . He has located this novel so
dreamily far away. The storytelling is formal and subtly archaic,
the dialogue elaborate and courteous, clearly paying homage to
Malory and Le Morte d’Arthur. Yet it is a far more sophisticated
narrative than it at first appears, progressively switching its
point of view away from Axl with whom we began, to give us two
‘reveries of Gawain’, for example, and then, in a sorrowful final
chapter, reaching into the heart of the pair’s own story, revealing
their own failings, showing us Axl and Beatrice from the
perspective of the failed boatman . . . The Buried Giant . .
. reveal itself as a work not just of great originality but
peculiar, even hypnotic, beauty: such a late, great extension to
Arthurian literature.”
—David Sexton, Evening Standard
“Axl and Beatrice’s adventures . . . grow in urgency yet never
sacrifice the mood of quiet, elegiac pessimism that has always
characterized Mr. Ishiguro’s writing—and that makes his novels
strangely both melancholic and soothing. . . . For all its
fantastical trappings, The Buried Giant is a simple and powerful
tale of love, aging and loss—no radical departure for this splendid
writer but another excellent novel all the same.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“A lyrical, allusive (and elusive) voyage into the mists of
British folklore by renowned novelist Ishiguro. . . . The premise
of a nation made up of amnesiac people longing for meaning is
beguiling . . . Ishiguro is a master of subtlety; as with Never Let
Me Go he allows a detail to slip out here, another there, until we
are finally aware of the facts of the matter, horrible though they
may be. . . . Lovely: a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in
and departing from a rich literary tradition.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“It’s a sad, elegiac story . . . A dreamy journey . . . Easy to
read but difficult to forget.”
—Lydia Millet, Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Ishiguro was described as ‘a master craftsman’ by Margaret Atwood,
and he is every inch that throughout this book, from the
self-confidence and certainty of the slow start, through to the
final, profound and very moving, pages’.
—Emily Hourican, Irish Independent
“Ishiguro’s story is a deceptively simple one, for enfolded within
its elemental structure are many profound truths, including its
beautiful and memorable portrait of a long-term marriage and its
subtle commentary on the eternity of war, all conveyed in the
author’s mesmerizing prose.”
—Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
“Tangled and satisfying . . . [Ishiguro’s] novels have for the last
two decades frustrated expectations, and his decision to venture
into the realm of legend this time is of a piece with the risks
he’s been taking all along. . . . Ishiguro’s novels dramatize
quests for self-knowledge, and though The Buried Giant . . .
may be his most exotic work . . . it may also be his most direct
assault on the question.”
—Christian Lorentzen, Bookforum
“Part of the brilliance of this novel is that it can be read at
face value and enjoyed . . . or it can be read deep, deeper, and
deeper still, until the reader begins scrutinizing the words not on
the pages as intensely as each description and every scrap of
dialog.”
—Betty Scott, Books & Whatnot
“The world’s greatest living novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, has a new
book out. It is a masterpiece.”
—David Walliams
“A novelist of unparalleled distinction. The style is elegant,
sparse, non-archaic and, as with Ishiguro’s other works, it
accumulates as you progress, until you are mesmerised by the agony
of his characters. It is a bold, sorrowful, brilliant and
unyielding book. The journey might be imaginary, yet it is
existentially real, and that is its great beauty and strength.”
—Joanna Kavenna, Prospect
“A new novel from Ishiguro, his first in 10 years, is quite
possibly the literary event of 2015. . . . The Buried Giant is
another thought-provoking literary masterpiece.”
—Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller
“This book is a love story, an adventure story, a mystery tale and
an allegory. It’s also an unforgettable book about forgetting. . .
. Once you have read this book you will want to read it again.”
—Erich Mayer, Publishing ArtsHub (Australia)
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