The maze of human memory--the ways in which we accommodate and alter it,
deceive and deliver ourselves with it--is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro
has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner
world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare
inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans,
his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a
brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one's past to
determine the present.Christopher Banks, an English boy born in
early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his
mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to
live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more
than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sion-Japanese
War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances.The
story is straightforward. Its telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice
is controlled, detailed, and detached, its precision unsurprising in
someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the
rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is
slowly revealed what he can't, or won't, see: that his memory, despite
what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies;
that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can
be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires--a
child's for his parents, a man's for understanding--may give rise to the
most complicated truths.A masterful combination of narrative control and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Roguish at his best
Book Detail
- Publisher
- Transworld Publishers UK
- Publication Date
- 10/01/2018
- Number of Pages
- 384
- Binding
- Paper Back
- ISBN
- 9780571205622
- Category
-
Children Books , Activity
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