Aoife Clifford

Oh, my God, I love this book.

And there are sentences in his books that make me cry.

There are ideas that kind of haunt me.

Books with equal amounts of brain and heart.

Ishiguro is one of my favourite writers.

I've read everything that he's written.

And he really is the master of the first person narration.

And he kind of revels in the blinkered narrative and the limited world that kind of delivers.

And they're sort of stories for an intimate audience, I find.

For example, you take Stevens, the butler in Remains of the Day, who sort of assumes that anyone who he's addressing is primarily interested in what makes a good butler or how would you best run a large house like Darlington Hall.

So he tends to use sort of semi-unreliable narrators in their particular world because we're sort of semi-unreliable narrators in our own world.

What I think he's most interested in is sort of the ordinary person and talking about what makes us human.

So that his characters tend to be that unsung person in an extraordinary world.

Clara and the Sun is a deeply moving book and it's definitely one of my top reads for this year.

I actually found it to be probably Ishiguro's most optimistic book with kind of insights into what makes us human, what makes us different from each other, so individuals, as well as sort of the sacrifices that we will make in sort of the name of love and in friendship.

And what's great is he builds a world where even though you don't see the whole world, you only see it through Clara's eyes, which is a very limited view.

But it's a world where it becomes clear that technology is not being shared equally.

And it also explores the benefits of the technology, but also the costs of it.

And so I found it to be a real winner from a writer who I think is simply a genius.

Yes, this new one is called Rodham and it has a very simple premise.