Playground focuses primarily on four characters, who we know will come to share a connection. In Montreal, Evie Beaulieu is introduced in dramatic fashion, as a 12-year-old plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool, strapped to one of the first aqualungs by her father, and grows to love the ocean and everything connected to it. In Chicago, two super-smart kids with vastly differing backgrounds bond at an elite high school over their love of sophisticated board games. And finally there’s Ina Aroita, who has to my memory a far less memorable introduction, but is apparently considered to be one of the four main players also.

Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, released to much anticipation last year at the height of the Covid Pandemic. It’s told from the perspective of an AF (Artificial Friend), a robotic life-form created to help provide company for children in a world in which they are no longer able to (for reasons not initially stated) socialise in school-like settings. As in Never Let Me Go, many key details are withheld. We come to understand via Klara’s limited but perceptive observations that this world is different to our own in ways we don’t quite understand (beyond just the existence of sentient AI-based lifeforms, of course.)