“I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.”

Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is known for fiction in English and for the wide recognition his work has received, including the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. Ishiguro writes across several forms, but he is best known for novels that probe memory, loss, and the fragile ties between people and the world around them. The Swedish Academy praised his work for its emotional force and for the way it reveals what lies beneath the feeling of connection.