Friday Reads: The Buried Giant

If you're looking for a misty, mysterious fantasy novel to read this summer, Adam's current book might fit the bill. Read on for his teaser of The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro!

Set in a mostly uncivilized post-Arthurian England, The Buried Giant tells the story of an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, who live in a small hillside village. The England of the novel is a land shrouded in mist, where ogres and dragons roam the land, and where everyone is experiencing a mysterious sort of collective amnesia. Some believe it is the constant mists that cloud their memories. With vague recollections occasionally gnawing at the corners of their minds, Axl and Beatrice set out on a journey to visit their barely remembered son, and along the way they are joined by a fierce Saxon warrior, an orphaned boy with a strange bite wound, and the aging Arthurian knight, Sir Gawain. Facing peril from human and non-human threats alike, they continue on their way, slowly piecing together the truths about their shared past.

This is a different kind of fantasy novel than I've read before, borrowing genre iconography like dragons and ogres, but with a very grounded storyline and language that reads more like historical fiction, despite its mythic trappings. It's also a highly allegorical novel, and its examination of collective responses to guilt and trauma feels sadly relevant. Kazuo Ishiguro also wrote two of my favorite novels, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both of which offer similarly slow, subtle builds to their respective story revelations. They're the kind of novels for which the phrase "quietly devastating" was coined, and The Buried Giant is another work that fits that description to a T.