When We Were Orphans (First American Edition)

Kazuo Ishiguro

ISBN 10: 0375410546 / ISBN 13: 9780375410543

Published by Knopf (New York), 2000

About this Item

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. First American edition, first printing. Hardcover. Quarter brown cloth over cream paper-covered boards, with gilt spine lettering. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Publisher s original price intact on jacket flap ($25.00). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. A tight, clean copy with no faults. Octavo, 336 pages. Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde. When We Were Orphans follows Christopher Banks, a celebrated English detective, who returns to Shanghai in the 1930s to unravel the mystery of his parents' disappearance during his childhood. Ishiguro (b. 1954) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and has had multiple novels adapted to film. This was his fifth novel, written after the Booker Prize winning "The Remains of the Day" (1989) and before "Never Let Me Go" (2005). Rear Copies.

Seller Inventory # 10-2015-312

Bibliographic Details

• Title: When We Were Orphans (First American Edition)
• Publisher: Knopf (New York)
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375410546
• ISBN 13: 9780375410543
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Nobel Prize in Literature

About this title

Synopsis

The maze of human memory--the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it--is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans, his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one's past to determine the present.

Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances.

The story is straightforward. Its telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice is controlled, detailed, and detached, its precision unsurprising in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is slowly revealed what he can't, or won't, see: that his memory, despite what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies; that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires--a child's for his parents, a man's for understanding--may give rise to the most complicated truths.

A masterful combination of narrative control and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro at his best.

About the Author

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five. He is the author of four previous novels, including The Remains of the Day, an international best-seller that won the Booker Prize and was adapted into an award-winning film. Ishiguro's work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1995, he received an Order of the British Empire for service to literature, and in 1998 was named a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.