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Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels have often been about “outsiders trying to navigate worlds that are mysterious or faintly threatening”, said Jon Day in the FT. In his latest – his first since winning the Nobel Prize – the narrator is a type of robot known as an “AF” (“artificial friend”), whose job is to provide companionship for lonely children. When the novel opens, Klara has yet to be bought, and spends her days standing in a shop window, puzzledly observing passers-by and bathing in the sun (from which she gets her energy). One day, she is picked out by a girl named Josie, and goes to live with her. Although much about this set-up feels like “familiar sci-fi fare”, it’s “deftly done”, and gradually this scrupulously unshowy novel reveals its “true and devastating significance”. This is “a book about the big questions of existence”. What is a person, for instance? And how should we “respond to the unfairness of the world”?
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A decade ago, Eliot Higgins was “little more than a geek with an admin job in Leicester”, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Today, he runs what he describes in the subtitle of this book as “an intelligence agency for the people”. As the founder of the investigative website Bellingcat, it is largely down to him that the world knows as much as it does about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the shooting down of flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, and the identities of the Russian agents behind the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. Higgins started on his quest during the Libyan war of 2011, when he realised that there was a “wealth of information” available on the internet, which wasn’t being picked up by traditional media. By studying a video released by rebel forces, and then geo-locating it using Google Earth, he disproved one of the Gaddafi regime’s major strategic claims. That, pretty much, remains his modus operandi today – though he ha