When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.
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 inter-war years, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.
About The Author
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and came to Britain at the age of five. He is the author of the novels A Pale View of Hills (winner of the Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (winner of the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, and shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (winner of the 1989 Booker Prize) and When We Were Orphans (shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize and Whitbread Novel of the Year).
Kazuo Ishiguro's books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. The Remains of the Day became an international bestseller, with over a million copies sold in the English language alone, and was adapted into an award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Industry Reviews
"Swift, compelling, moving, irresistible."
--The Baltimore Sun "Goes much further than even The Remains of the Day in its examination of the roles we've had handed to us... His fullest achievement yet."
--The New York Times Book Review
"You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction."
--Sunday Times (London)
"Poignant... When We Were Orphans may well be Ishiguro's most capacious book so far."
--Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books
"[A]n imaginative work of surpassing intelligence and taste."
--Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement
"With his characteristic finesse, Mr. Ishiguro infuses what seems like a classic adventure story with an ineffable tinge of strangeness."
--The Wall Street Journal
