The Buried Giant

By Kazuo Ishiguro,

Book cover of The Buried Giant

Book description

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*

The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.

The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a…

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Why read it?

4 authors picked The Buried Giant as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Ishiguro is a master at combining both amazing world-building and dynamic and controlled prose. The Buried Giant is a master class in both! But that’s what one expects by a Nobel Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. But let’s be specific in our praise.

First, let’s take a closer look at the world-building. When a writer chooses a world to populate, he/she steps into the “known/new” dilemma. This is the conundrum of what is out there, what would be derivative, what would be cliché or such a well-trodden path that to use…

Some novels lean into the alienness of their historical settings, making them feel almost like secondary worlds.

The Buried Giant is one of those. It takes place partly in legend, after the death of King Arthur, and follows an elderly married couple in a society that has quite literally lost its memory. I struggled with this book at first because the prose is so unassuming, but it got under my skin.

Ishiguro's simple prose creates a feeling of unsettling ordinariness, like the way your dreaming brain accepts a logic your waking brain never could.

Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant absolutely haunts me. At the heart of Ishiguro’s story lies a terrible act of cruelty and injustice, but his writing is incredibly gentle, sorrowful, and loving. It is a story about the price of memory. I don’t think that it is an argument against bearing witness, but its exploration of what we remember, what it costs us, and what good it does us is quietly and deeply shocking, and so very sad. I am always in awe of the simplicity and dignity of Ishiguro’s style and the originality of his thought.

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Sheri T. Joseph Author Of Edge of the Known World

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Sheri's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

Edge of the Known World is a near-future love and adventure story about a brilliant young refugee caught in era when genetic screening tests like 23AndMe make it impossible to hide a secret identity. The novel is distributed by Simon & Schuster. It is a USA Today Bestseller and 2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction: General.

Alexandra is a gifted student, adoring daughter, and exuberant prankster. She is also hiding in the open. After a blissful childhood, Alex learned she’s an illegal refugee from a brutal regime, smuggled into…

By Sheri T. Joseph,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Edge of the Known World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.

2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction

Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of…


Dreams are for revealing what’s buried so that we can reclaim it and be healed. Half romantic dream, half subtle nightmare, this haunting tale chases buried love and identity, buried memories of children that may or may not be real, and the buried secrets and collective trauma of a civilization itself, which never come to any harsh-lit, practical conclusion but end with as much aching ambiguity as a dream itself. Thinking of this book years later, I still remember a journey of endless mist and yearning through mythic Britain, called forth by the unbroken thread of ancient, marital tenderness in…

From Mindi's list on dream-like fairy tales.

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