The Purdue English Big Read's 2026-2027 Reveal!

The Purdue English Department's 2026–27 Big Read selection is Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.

Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro's eighth novel, is a thought-provoking work from the Nobel Prize-winning author. The story follows Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF), who watches the world from her place in a store—carefully studying the behaviour of those who enter and those who pass by outside—while hoping to be chosen by a customer.

When Klara is finally purchased, her perspective opens onto a wider world shaped by human relationships, fragile hopes, and quiet uncertainties. Through her attentive gaze, the novel explores questions of love, faith, and what it means to care for another in an increasingly technological society. Both intimate and expansive, Klara and the Sun offers a compelling vision of our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator. 

Born in Japan and raised in Britain, Ishiguro is widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary writers in English. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; the Swedish Academy praised him as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection to the world."

Praise for Klara and the Sun:

• "Like a medieval pilgrim walking a cathedral labyrinth in meditation, Ishiguro keeps pacing his way through these big existential themes in his fiction. Klara and the Sun is yet another return pilgrimage and it's one of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written." — Maureen Corrigan, NPR
• "It aspires to enchantment, or to put it another way, reenchantment, the restoration of magic to a disenchanted world. Ishiguro drapes realism like a thin cloth over a primordial cosmos. Every so often, the cloth slips, revealing the old gods, the terrible beasts, the warring forces of light and darkness." — Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
• "For four decades now, Ishiguro has written eloquently about the balancing act of remembering without succumbing irrevocably to the past. Memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects… Klara and the Sun complements his brilliant vision...There's no narrative instinct more essential, or more human." — Radhika Jones, New York Times Book Review

Join us for another exciting year of the Purdue English Big Read!