Black Bag follows an unnamed struggling actor whose career highlights to date have largely involved performing mid-meal mystery theatre to crowds of indifferent rich folks. He accepts a bizarre performance-based job posted by a university professor named Dr. Blend. Modeled on a real-life 1967 social experiment, the job requires him to zip himself inside a large black leather bag, and sit in silence at the back of a lecture theatre during Blend’s psychology classes. He is strictly forbidden from speaking or interacting with the students, serving merely as an anonymous object for the class to react to. As the experiment progresses, the protagonist finds comfort in the anonymity of the bag, eventually choosing to wear it outside of his required hours and adapting to its practical challenges and potential for social alienation. His fellow students, as proposed by the original experiment’s premise, after going through a phase of resenting his presence, ultimately come to respect and even like ‘Black Bag’.

Playground focuses primarily on four characters, who we know will come to share a connection. In Montreal, Evie Beaulieu is introduced in dramatic fashion, as a 12-year-old plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool, strapped to one of the first aqualungs by her father, and grows to love the ocean and everything connected to it. In Chicago, two super-smart kids with vastly differing backgrounds bond at an elite high school over their love of sophisticated board games. And finally there’s Ina Aroita, who has to my memory a far less memorable introduction, but is apparently considered to be one of the four main players also.

Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, released to much anticipation last year at the height of the Covid Pandemic. It’s told from the perspective of an AF (Artificial Friend), a robotic life-form created to help provide company for children in a world in which they are no longer able to (for reasons not initially stated) socialise in school-like settings. As in Never Let Me Go, many key details are withheld. We come to understand via Klara’s limited but perceptive observations that this world is different to our own in ways we don’t quite understand (beyond just the existence of sentient AI-based lifeforms, of course.)