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Title: standard sci-fi premise for a standard romance.
Review: This may be Ishiguro's most accessible novel since Remains of The Day, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Where The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans were surreal masterpieces of disjointed dream-illogic, this novel takes a fairly standard science-fiction premise and uses it as the backdrop to a fairly standard yet oddly dispassionate romance. That's not to say that there is nothing to recommend this book. It has its moments of beautiful prose, thought-provoking characterizations and, of course, it's not a semi-autobiographical portrait of a creative writing professor, as so many novels seem to be these days. But it's funny: I just saw the film Me You And Everybody We Know the other night, and it succeeded at the kind of story Ishiguro has told so well in the past far better than this novel does.
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