From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

In Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* Shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life. 'Exquisite.' Guardian 'A feat of imaginative sympathy.' New York Times What readers are saying: 'A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking even after finishing it. 5/5 stars' 'I loved it, every single word of it.' 'It took me wholly by surprise.' 'Utterly beautiful.' 'Essentially perfect.'

An elegant Everyman's Library hardcover edition of the universally acclaimed novel--winner of the Booker Prize, a bestseller and a perpetually strong backlist title, and the basis for an award-winning film--with full-cloth binding, a silk ribbon marker, a chronology, and a new introduction by Salman Rushdie.
Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give . . .

On first publication in 1995, The Unconsoled was met in some quarters with bewilderment and vilification, in others with the highest praise. One commentator asked, 'Has Ishiguro gone for greatness or has he gone mad?' Over the years, this uniquely strange and extraordinary novel about a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control has come to be seen by many as being the key work and a turning point in his career.

One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life. 'Exquisite.' Guardian 'A feat of imaginative sympathy.' New York Times What readers are saying: 'A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking even after finishing it. 5/5 stars' 'I loved it, every single word of it.' 'It took me wholly by surprise.' 'Utterly beautiful.' 'Essentially perfect.'

Designed to meet the requirements for students at GCSE and A level, this accessible educational edition offers the complete text of Never Let Me Go with a comprehensive study guide. Intended for individual study as well as class use, Geoff Barton's guide: - clearly introduces the context of the novel and its author; - examines in detail its themes, characters and structure; - looks at the novel in the author's own words, and at different critical receptions; - provides glossaries and test questions to prompt deeper thinking. In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at a seemingly idyllic school, Hailsham, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD (NOW COSTA) BOOK OF THE YEAR 1948: Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his two grown daughters and his grandson, and his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past - to a life and a career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism - a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity. 'An exquisite novel.' Observer 'Pitch-perfect . a tour de force of unreliable narration.' Guardian 'A work of spare elegance: refined, understated, economic.' Sunday Times

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Moving between London and Shanghai of the interwar years, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* Kazuo Ishiguro's highly acclaimed debut, first published in 1982, tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko - a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy - the memories start to take on a disturbing cast. 'A macabre and faultlessly worked enigma.' Sunday Times 'One of the outstanding fictional debuts of recent years.' Observer 'A delicate, ironic, elliptical novel . Its characters are remarkably convincing . but what one remembers is its balance, halfway between elegy and irony.' New York Times Book Review 'An extraordinarily fine first novel . its themes are deceptively large and uncommonly haunting.' Los Angeles Times

Gut Microbiota: Interactive Effects on Nutrition and Health focuses on the fascinating intestinal microbiome as it relates to nutrition. The book covers the core science in the microbiome field and draws links between the microbiome and nutrition in medicine. Reflecting the most current state of evidence available in the field, the early chapters introduce key concepts about the microbiome, and the latter focus on the application of the gut microbiome and nutrition science. Both human studies and animal studies (where appropriate) are discussed throughout the work. Addressing topics such as gut microbiota throughout the lifespan, gut microbiota in health and disease, and genetic and environmental influences on gut microbiota, this book will provide scientists and clinicians who have an interest in the microbiome with an understanding of the future potential and limitations of this tool as they strive to make use of evidence-based diet information for the maintenance of good health.

Building off the success of the first edition, Gut Microbiota: Interactive Effects on Nutrition and Health, Second Edition, details the complex relationship between diet, the gut microbiota, and health. This second edition expands its coverage of emerging practical applications in nutrition and medicine. Covering topics such as the ecological concepts that apply to the gut microbiota and the effects of aging on the gut microbiome, among others, this book is sure to be a welcome resource to microbiome science trainees, food and nutrition researchers working in academia, and industry and healthcare professionals giving dietary recommendations to the general public.

Motivation It is our dream to understand the principles of animals' remarkable ability for adaptive motion and to transfer such abilities to a robot. Up to now, mechanisms for generation and control of stereotyped motions and adaptive motions in well-known simple environments have been formulated to some extentandsuccessfullyappliedtorobots.However, principlesofadaptationto variousenvironmentshavenotyetbeenclari?ed, andautonomousadaptation remains unsolved as a seriously di?cult problem in robotics. Apparently, the ability of animals and robots to adapt in a real world cannot be explained or realized by one single function in a control system and mechanism. That is, adaptation in motion is induced at every level from thecentralnervoussystemtothemusculoskeletalsystem.Thus, weorganized the International Symposium on Adaptive Motion in Animals and Machines(AMAM)forscientistsandengineersconcernedwithadaptation onvariouslevelstobebroughttogethertodiscussprinciplesateachleveland to investigate principles governing total systems. History AMAM started in Montreal (Canada) in August 2000. It was organized by H. Kimura (Japan), H. Witte (Germany), G. Taga (Japan), and K. Osuka (Japan), who had agreed that having a small symposium on motion control, with people from several ?elds coming together to discuss speci?c issues, was worthwhile. Those four organizing committee members determined the scope of AMAM as follows."

From the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day

The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards—some strange and otherworldly—but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight—each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life’s memories.

Sometimes savage, sometimes mysterious, always intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade tells a luminous story about the act of forgetting and the power of memory, a resonant tale of love, vengeance, and war.

In a time when female scholars were rare in Japanese universities, Michiko Ogura completed an excellent doctorate in Old English syntax, then achieved a position at Chiba University, from which she obtained a year-long research fellowship in 1983-84 at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. During her career, Ogura has published major works on medieval English syntax, especially verbs. Professor Ogura retired at Chiba, then obtained a major research post at Keio University (2011-2015) and then a post at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, retiring in 2020. She obtained a D.Litt. from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland in 2008. The international contributors to this volume offer these studies of medieval syntax in her honor, in token of many years of friendship and scholarship.

This book describes the teleoperated android Geminoid, which has a very humanlike appearance, movements, and perceptions, requiring unique developmental techniques. The book facilitates understanding of the framework of android science and how to use it in real human societies. Creating body parts of soft material by molding an existing person using a shape-memory form provides not only the humanlike texture of the body surface but also safe physical interaction, that is, humanlike interpersonal interaction between people and the android. The teleoperation also highlights novel effects in telecommunication. Operators of the Geminoid feel the robot's body as their own, and people encountering the teleoperated Geminoid perceive the robot's body as being possessed by the operator as well.Where does the feeling of human presence come from? Can we transfer or reproduce human presence by technology? Geminoid may help to answer these questions.

When Ray turns up to visit his old university friends Charlie and Emily, he's given a special task: to be so much his useless self that he makes Charlie look good by comparison.

But Ray has his own buried feelings to contend with. Decades earlier, he and Emily would listen to jazz when they were alone, and now, as Sarah Vaughan sings through the speakers, he struggles to control everything the sound brings with it.

In Kazuo Ishiguro's hands, a snapshot of domestic realism becomes a miniature masterpiece of memory and forgetting.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Human-Robot Interaction in Social Robotics explores important issues in designing a robot system that works with people in everyday environments. Edited by leading figures in the field of social robotics, it draws on contributions by researchers working on the Robovie project at the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, a world leader in humanoid interactive robotics. The book brings together, in one volume, technical and empirical research that was previously scattered throughout the literature. Taking a networked robot approach, the book examines how robots work in cooperation with ubiquitous sensors and people over telecommunication networks. It considers the use of social robots in daily life, grounding the work in field studies conducted at a school, train station, shopping mall, and science museum. Critical in the development of network robots, these usability studies allow researchers to discover real issues that need to be solved and to understand what kinds of services are possible. The book tackles key areas where development is needed, namely, in sensor networks for tracking humans and robots, humanoids that can work in everyday environments, and functions for interacting with people. It introduces a sensor network developed by the authors and discusses innovations in the Robovie humanoid, including several interactive behaviors and design policies. Exploring how humans interact with robots in daily life settings, this book offers valuable insight into how robots may be used in the future. The combination of engineering, empirical, and field studies provides readers with rich information to guide in developing practical interactive robots.

Human-Robot Interaction in Social Robotics explores important issues in designing a robot system that works with people in everyday environments. Edited by leading figures in the field of social robotics, it draws on contributions by researchers working on the Robovie project at the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, a world leader in humanoid interactive robotics. The book brings together, in one volume, technical and empirical research that was previously scattered throughout the literature. Taking a networked robot approach, the book examines how robots work in cooperation with ubiquitous sensors and people over telecommunication networks. It considers the use of social robots in daily life, grounding the work in field studies conducted at a school, train station, shopping mall, and science museum. Critical in the development of network robots, these usability studies allow researchers to discover real issues that need to be solved and to understand what kinds of services are possible. The book tackles key areas where development is needed, namely, in sensor networks for tracking humans and robots, humanoids that can work in everyday environments, and functions for interacting with people. It introduces a sensor network developed by the authors and discusses innovations in the Robovie humanoid, including several interactive behaviors and design policies. Exploring how humans interact with robots in daily life settings, this book offers valuable insight into how robots may be used in the future. The combination of engineering, empirical, and field studies provides readers with rich information to guide in developing practical interactive robots.

Upon meeting with a cult known as the Liviemen, Kiruko and Maru are tasked to dispose of some man-eaters. Their project would lead them to the people behind the organization known as the Immortal Order. With conflicting ideologies fighting for their services and rare working machinery in the heart of Tokyo, the two must decide whether or not to continue on their quest or to settle down with "civilization".

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England.

At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving "a great gentleman." But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness" and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick!

Klara and the Sun is a magnificent new novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro--author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.

Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her.

Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

In its award citation in 2017, the Nobel committee described Ishiguro's books as novels of great emotional force and said he has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.

Kiriko has finally found Robin. But the reunion is not all smiles. Actually it is nothing but trauma as the two realize that this is a realtionship shared between three people and one of them has no current say in this reunion.