“It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?”
A rather different detective novel from Ishiguro, this tale set in the 1930s travels between London and Shanghai to unearth the secret that has plagued England's celebrated detective his whole life - the disappearance of his parents.
There is something cinematic about this novel, easy to imagine it on screen with its mysterious locales, interesting characters and continual building of pace. One imagines it as a fabulous Netflix series full of flashbacks of the young Christopher and Akira in the Shanghai of their youth. The author captures a sense of the multiple worlds it inhabits - east and west, affluent repose and the desperation of the streets, particularly in the war-ravaged slums.
While this didn't grab me in the same fashion as Never Let Me Go, upon reflection it is a haunting story which remains with the reader for sometime. The sense of confusion and danger of opening up the past is one that remains.
4 out of 5 childhood memories are unreliable narrators.
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