10 Must-Read Books After Klara and the Sun

Don’t let the film’s tepid reception fool you: Klara and the Sun is an incredible feat of sci-fi. At least the original novel is. Kazuo Ishiguro’s first book after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature is a tender near-future story that, yes, is about a robot learning to live with humans, but, more broadly, is about a family learning to live together in the face of unimaginable tragedy.

In real life, AI may feel increasingly ominous, but Ishiguro’s fantastical world is insistently hopeful, rendered in vivid color through prickly family dynamics and masterful prose. It’s everything he does best. Whether the film worked for you on every level or left a sour taste in your mouth, the book—and optimistic, human-centered near-future sci-fi—is more than worth reading.

The Buried Giant

By Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)

Kazuo Ishiguro never repeats himself. While two of his most popular novels, Klara and Never Let Me Go, both experiment with elements of sci-fi, it would be wildly inaccurate to even attempt to pin the author to one genre.

Instead, his novels share other through lines: his incredible ability to wield emotional impact with surgical precision, and his unrelenting faith in humanity. Only in the last two decades of his 44-year career has Ishiguro chosen to interpret those qualities through a fantastical lens.

That fact means Ishiguro’s last novel before Klara and the Sun is also one of the best books to read if you loved it. Though its setting couldn’t be more different—a fantastical version of England shortly after King Arthur’s death—The Buried Giant shares Klara’s poignant focus on a family in mourning. All of England is experiencing selective amnesia, but one grieving couple can’t forget the pain of losing their son. Along their winding journey to uncover his memory, Ishiguro finds yet another moving, magical family story.

You can purchase The Buried Giant 10 Must-Read Books After Klara and.

Always Coming Home

By Ursula K. Le Guin (1985)

At its core, Klara and the Sun is a very strong, very optimistic piece of introductory sci-fi. But no one did optimistic sci-fi better than Ursula K. Le Guin.

In Always Coming Home, Le Guin takes her turn with a beloved sci-fi trope: an anthropologist from the distant future examines artifacts from our present, trying to piece together the story of a human race that died off long ago. But, true to Le Guin’s signature, this post-apocalyptic story isn’t particularly ominous or depressing. Like Ishiguro, her writing teems with faith in humanity. She’s insistently, refreshingly hopeful about the kind of humans we can become before we’re reduced to a collection of artifacts—and what will come after.

You can purchase Always Coming Home 10 Must-Read Books After Klara and.

The Humans

By Matt Haig (2013)

Matt Haig’s sci-fi novel has zero robots, but if what you enjoyed most about Klara was watching a non-human creature learn to be human through observation, it will be right up your alley.

The Humans is a reckoning with what it means to be the title creature, and what, if anything, makes humanity worth saving. Its narrator—an alien who arrives on Earth and disguises himself as a Cambridge professor to complete an ominous secret mission—can’t help but look down on humans. Eventually, however, also can’t help but fall in love with personhood, in all its quirks and imperfections, and with the human family whose lives he invades. Haig’s mastery is in striking a pitch-perfect balance between the ominousness of an alien invasion and the childlike wonder of discovering humanity anew.

The Mother Code

By Carole Stivers (2020)

This novel sits somewhere between an inverse Klara and an alternative take on Superman’s origin story. The Mother Code inverts the increasingly popular literary trope of parents raising robot children, instead following a young boy and his robot “mother,” one of a class of machines specially programmed to gestate and nurture human babies after a bioweapon killed most of the population.

As with all robot-human family sagas, this family unit inevitably can’t stay together forever. But that knot in the story is where Stivers grows even bolder in setting her robot novel apart. Where most novels center on robots learning tenderness through their human companions, Stivers introduces an even bigger dilemma: what it means to be human when your closest loved one is something else entirely.

You can purchase The Mother Code ​​​​​​here.

Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

Klara and the Sun paints a strikingly optimistic portrait of the AI age. Station Eleven paints an even more optimistic portrait of the end of the world.

Though it contains echoes of classic post-apocalyptic stories like “By the Waters of Babylon,” Mandel’s sentimental sci-fi tale is too fiercely original to pin down. Set in a future where a flu pandemic has wiped out most of Earth’s population, Station Eleven follows an unlikely group of apocalyptic heroes. They’re not the savvy fighters of Dungeon Crawler Carl or the grizzled survivors of The Road—they’re artists and performers, touring the planet’s few remaining settlements to entertain what’s left of humanity.

It’s no mystery why readers clung to this novel at the height of the COVID era: like Ishiguro, Emily St. John Mandel offers a refreshingly hopeful idea about how humanity can, and will, navigate a world we no longer recognize.

You can purchase Station Eleven here.

Children Of The New World

By Alexander Weinstein (2016)

Before Taika Waititi got his hands on Klara and the Sun, Korean filmmaker Kogonada made his own robot-child movie inspired by another brilliant sci-fi book: After Yang. The film, starring Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith as frantic parents trying desperately to repair their robot “son,” is based on one of the 13 stories in this stunning collection by Alexander Weinstein.

In these near-future sci-fi stories, Weinstein renders a powerful, if sometimes terrifying, vision of a world where children bear the weight of navigating a culture overrun by, and obsessed with, technological “innovations.” Robot siblings break down. Parents grieve avatar children and have AI affairs. Middle schoolers run away from tech-addicted parents for a taste of the Sun. In each delicate, foreboding story, Weinstein doesn’t ask whether an AI-dominated future will come to pass, but if, and how, we’ll raise our children to live through it.

You can purchase Children of the New World here.

A Psalm For The Wild-Built

By Becky Chambers (2021)

Often, the most optimistic of robot tales follow human families who integrate an android into their routine and learn to love it while it learns to love humanity. But A Psalm for the Wild-Built is not a robot tale you’ve read before.

If anything, this novel feels more akin to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, if it were set on another planet and the titular protagonists were nonbinary baristas. Our narrator, nomadic tea-brewing monk Dey, stumbles into a kind of magic that once thrived on their planet but has long since disappeared: a fully functioning robot with a quest of its own.

In this pervasively good-natured, solar-punk vision of space, Chambers grapples with the same loneliness Ishiguro explored so vividly in Klara and the Sun, and reaches a similar conclusion: the cure is to love selflessly.

You can purchase A Psalm for the Wild-Built here.

Machines Like Me

By Ian McEwan (2019)

Klara and the Sun is often billed as an optimistic story about humans learning to integrate a robot into their daily lives—but it’s mostly just optimistic for the human characters. Klara’s fate is harder to categorize. If, after reading the novel, you’re still thinking about Klara, Ian McEwan’s take on the robot-human bond may align more with some of the thornier, more poignant feelings the novel’s ending elicited.

Machines Like Me is also a story about a robot learning to be part of a human family—in this case, a single man buys a robot (who also takes the form of an adult man) to be his companion, only for their relationship to deteriorate when the human falls in love. But McEwan’s take on the trope is decidedly less optimistic than Ishiguro’s.

In the canon of sentient robot stories, think of this as Maybe Happy Ending with a dash of Companion. Rather than finding solace in serving humans, as Klara did, McEwan’s robot poses a more complicated question: what if, after so much careful observation of humanity, this machine wants the same autonomy for himself? Who gets to decide who is an object, and who is human?

You can purchase Machines Like Me here.

Passengers

By Alexander Maksik (2026)

There are no robots, aliens, or other humanoid entities in Alexander Maksik’s near-future family drama. Aside from the apocalypse unfolding in the background, Passengers is all realism.

Instead, another theme ties this novel to Klara and the Sun: a complicated family learning to live together. Passengers is set entirely in an airport terminal, where an elderly father and his adult daughter await a flight consistently delayed by a mounting climate disaster. But the characters can’t see or hear this apocalyptic event from the terminal. Instead, just as humanoid robots were merely an entry point for Ishiguro to explore an evolving parent-child relationship, for Maksik, this never-ending wait is simply the backdrop for unraveling his narrators’ close but deeply strained bond.

In literature, there are endless ways to approach the end of the world. But Maksik’s take is especially hopeful: when everything else fades away, this family bond remains.

Luminous

By Silvia Park (2025)

For lovers of Klara and the Sun, Silvia Park’s debut novel may be as close as you can get to a book that captures the spirit without straight-up rehashing the story.

Like Klara, Luminous is a tender, disarmingly hopeful near-future family saga in which one family member happens to be a machine. Set in a reunified Korea, the novel follows two estranged adult siblings who still grieve the robot “brother” their scientist father kept, then gave away during their childhood. Unbeknownst to either of them, their brother is still “alive,” and has a quest of his own to complete.

Much like in Klara​​​​​​, there’s a heart-wrenching twist coming in this story. But along the way, Park finds room for both a reflective murder mystery and an endlessly entertaining sci-fi adventure. Luminous is simultaneously a timely story about learning to live in a rapidly changing technological landscape and a timeless one about mourning a loved one, and learning to live without them.