Since he began publishing novels in 1982, Kazuo Ishiguro's writing career has ascended at a remarkable pace. Few young writers have received such consistent international acclaim and won as many major literary prizes as Ishiguro. In 2000, the first edition of this study went to press, just as Ishiguro was setting out to promote his fifth novel, When We Were Orphans. My editor of this book, Brian Hulme, suggested that I include a postscript which described the novel. Ishiguro agreed to discuss When We Were Orphans over a telephone conversation with me in late 1999, despite the fact that the novel would not be released to the public for another several months. The next autumn, I met with Ishiguro in London, in order to conduct an interview, and I discussed with him the creative but somewhat unusual narrative methods that he used in When We Were Orphans.

This new edition includes an analysis of that novel as well as of his 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go. Bold, formal experimentation and deep consideration of substantial human themes continue to invigorate Ishiguro's fiction, but the fifth and sixth novels are edgier in some instances than those earlier and seemingly more lucid texts.

That the first three novels form a ‘trilogy’ of sorts has been addressed by Ishiguro, who observes that those novels were written by a young person beginning in his mid-twenties who thought about how people retraced their lives as they faced its end looming. The fourth novel, The Unconsoled, was so distinct in both style and content that some of Ishiguro's readers felt let down, despite the author's insistence for portraying a post-modern character caught in the warp and woof of a vexed past. When We Were Orphans reunites the polarized readers to an extent, since Ishiguro reclaims what appears a realist's perspective, in order to ground the abstract and philosophical journey taken by his protagonist. Never Let Me Go carries the concerns raised in When We Were Orphans to even more extreme explorations, but these two works evoke a similar kind of compassionate respect that the author has always managed for his otherwise flawed and unreliable characters. In this respect, Ishiguro continues to be a provocative and humanistic novelist.