Industry Reviews
'It is a profound examination of memory and guilt, of the way we recall past trauma en masse. It is also an extraordinarily atmospheric and compulsively readable tale, to be devoured in a single gulp. The Buried Giant is Game of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the Stone for the age of the trauma industry, a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget.'
Alex Preston, Guardian
'Ishiguro's prose is as spare, restrained, understated and formal as always, but beneath lie deep emotions. The ending, as so often with this writer, is all the more devastating for being so controlled.'
Independent
'A novel that's easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy ... "The Buried Giant" does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over. On a second reading, and on a third, its characters and events and motives are easier to understand, but even so, it guards its secrets and its world close. Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it. "The Buried Giant" is an exceptional novel.'
NEIL GAIMAN, THE NEW YORK TIMES
'What we are given in The Buried Giant has the clear ring of legend, as graceful, original and humane as anything Ishiguro has written.'
THE WASHINGTON POST
'What Ishiguro has delivered, after much labour, is a beautiful fable with a hard message at its core... there won't, I suspect, be a more important work of fiction published this year than The Buried Giant. And take note, Peter Jackson. Ishiguro's fiction makes wonderful films.'
JOHN SUTHERLAND THE TIMES
'The Buried Giant... reveals itself as a work not just of great originality but peculiar, even hypnotic, beauty: such a late, great extension to Arthurian literature'
DAVID SEXTON, Evening Standard
' Ishiguro is, as ever, very readable...the novel is moving and strangely resonant. I suspect him of being wise, of having a vision that subtly and politely exceeds that of ordinary people. .. Ultimately the novel achieves a tragic synthesis between its various parts that ... that reverberates powerfully in the mind'
THEO TAIT , Sunday Times
'Ishiguro was described as "a master craftsman" by Margaret Atwood, and he is every inch that throughout this book, from the self-confidence and certainty of the slow start, through to the final, profound and very moving, pages'.
EMILY HOURICAN , Irish Independent
'The world's greatest living novelist Kazuo Ishiguro has a new book out. It is a masterpiece.'
DAVID WALLIAMS
'A novelist of unparalleled distinction. The style is elegant, sparse, non-archaic and, as with Ishiguro's other works, it accumulates as you progress, until you are mesmerised by the agony of his characters. It is a bold, sorrowful, brilliant and unyielding book. The journey might be imaginary, yet it is existentially real, and that is its great beauty and strength'
JOANNA KAVENNA, PROSPECT
'The prose, as in many of Ishiguro's novels, is lapidary and beguiling, suggestive of secrets to be disclosed. ...for Ishiguro, our poet laureate of loss, the mercies of forgetfulness hold the greater
fascination ... The Buried Giant is ultimately a story about long love and making terms with oblivion. It is an eerie hybrid: a children's fable about old age. In Ishiguro's novel, as in life, love conquers all-all, that is, but death.'
NATHANIEL RICH, ATLANTIC
'If I was forced at knife point" to name my favourite Ishiguro novel, I would choose "The Buried Giant" for the way it uses fantasy tropes to explore questions about love and mortality. "Fantasy plus literary fiction can achieve things that frank blank realism can't'
DAVID MITCHELL author of CLOUD ATLAS quoted in New York Times
'The writing is at times lush and thrilling, rolling the gothic, fantastical, political, and philosophical into one. In its best moments, the fantasy elements blend with the exploration of memory, identity, and power to significant effect. The Buried Giant may feel very different from Ishiguro's previous works, but the concerns that lie at its heart have preoccupied him his entire career'.
ELAINE TENG, NEW REPUBLIC