Skip to main content Currently Reading Book World: In Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Klara and the Sun,' a robot tries to make sense of humanity Ron Charles, The Washington Post March 2, 2021 FacebookTwitterEmail By Kazuo Ishiguro - - - One hundred years ago, a play titled "R.U.R.," by Karel Čapek, debuted in Prague and gave us the word "robot." Since then, androids have been dreaming of electric sheep, and we've been having nightmares about the robot apocalypse. But calamity rarely comes in the neat, clarifying ways we fear. Leave it to Kazuo Ishiguro to articulate our inchoate anxieties about the future we're building. "Klara and the Sun," his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, is a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope. Readers still reeling from his 2005 novel "Never Let Me Go" will find here a gentler exploration of the price children pay for modern advancements. But if the weird complications of technology frame the plot, the real subject, as always in Ishiguro's dusk-lit fiction, is the moral quandary of the human heart.