New Reads:

This week, I'm reading When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. I first discovered Ishiguro when I stumbled across the movie version of his novel, Never Let Me Go. Because of my love for other Japanese authors (Haruki Murakami), big surprise, I liked it a lot. It's incredibly strange which is an element that I love in fiction and films. So I picked up the book version and started looking at the rest of his writing. Never Let Me Go is still sitting on my "to read" list but I am finally getting around to reading this one.

It goes a little something like this:

"Renowned London detective Christopher Banks was born in Shanghai at the beginning of the twentieth century, and lived there relatively happily until he was orphaned by the disappearance of his father and mother. Now, more than twenty years after leaving Shanghai, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the criminal expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate his understanding of the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels back to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of recovering all he has lost, only to find that the Sino-Japanese war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition -- and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him. Masterfully suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one's past."