Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade, The Buried Giant , will be released next March, his publisher Faber & Faber has announced. The book will be the first from the acclaimed author since 2005's Never Let Me Go , an unsettling examination of hope and mortality set in a dystopian near future.
The Buried Giant was described by Faber as "sometimes savage [and] often intensely moving". The publisher would only reveal that the book, Ishiguro's seventh novel, will be about "lost memories, love, revenge and war". Stephen Page, chief executive, said that the book was "a truly sublime new chapter in one of the most significant bodies of work of anyone writing today".
“It is as surprising, moving and brilliant as you could hope for, and we can’t wait to publish,” said Page.
In 2008, Ishiguro told the Paris Review that he had "arrived at an odd setting for the novel I'm writing at the moment". "I'd wanted for some time to write a novel about how societies remember and forget," the author said at the time. "I'd written about how individuals come to terms with uncomfortable memories. It occurred to me that the way an individual remembers and forgets is quite different to the way a society does. When is it better to just forget?"
Ishiguro won the Booker prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day , set between the wars in the English mansion Darlington Hall, and narrated by the ageing butler Stevens. The writer, who was born in Japan but came to Britain at the age of five, is also the author of A Pale View of Hills , published in 1982, An Artist of the Floating World, The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans . Nocturnes , a collection of short stories, was published in 2009.
He has been shortlisted for the Booker four times, and has also been given an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for Services to Literature, as well as the prestigious French decoration of Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day , which have both sold more than a million copies for Faber, have both been turned into films, the first starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, and the latter Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. – ( Guardian service)
