When We Were Orphans

About

Christopher Banks has become England's most celebrated detective in the 1930s, but the case that haunts him is the one from his childhood: the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai's International Settlement. When he returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery, the investigation collides with the Japanese invasion, and the detective-story framework begins to warp under the pressure of real historical violence. Ishiguro's most structurally daring novel uses the detective genre as a container for something far more unsettling — a study of how we construct narratives to protect ourselves from truths we can't face. The gap between Banks's confident deductions and the reality surrounding him grows wider and more disturbing with each chapter. A detective novel where the greatest mystery is the detective himself — and the case he's solving may be the story he's been telling himself all along.