Kazuo Ishiguro’sadventurous combination of historical fiction and detective story, set largely in England and Shanghai of the 1930s."With the detective peering through his metaphorical magnifying glass as the globe plunges towards a conflagration, the novel probes, with growing absurdity, the wounds of childhood as they drive and distort adulthood - at the cost of intimacy, family and personal happiness."-Maya Jaggi, The GuardianIn 1930s England, Christopher Banks has become the country’s most celebrated detective; his cases are the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents in Old Shanghai when he was a boy. As the world lurches towards war, Banks realises the time has come for him to return to the city of his childhood and at last to solve the mystery - and believes that only by his doing so will civilization be saved from approaching catastrophe."...with When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro appears to have found his synthesis, not only in its expansive yet finely modulated narrative but also in the way it bends the hallucinatory world of its immediate predecessor toward the surface verisimilitude of the butler's story ...seem like another deft postmodern exercise, a historical novel that's not concerned with the life of the past so much as with its literary assumptions..."   -Michael Gorra, The New York Times Book ReviewKazuo Ishiguro’sworks of fiction have earned him many honours around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go were both made into acclaimed films, and have each sold more than 2 million copies. Ishiguro was awarded a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan.