Is The Buried Giant Worth Reading?
Ada’s Score
Kazuo Ishiguro ventures into Arthurian fantasy with this haunting novel set in post-Roman Britain, where a strange mist has caused everyone in the land to forget the past. An elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, set out on a journey to find their estranged son and slowly discover what the forgetting is protecting them from. Ishiguro uses the genre's bones — knights, ogres, dragons — to meditate on memory, marriage, guilt, and the lies communities tell themselves to survive. It is quietly devastating and unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.
Deep Dive“Divisive and strange and utterly worth it. Ishiguro asks what we owe each other in forgetting — and the answer wrecked me.”
The Mist That Makes Us Forget
Ishiguro does something remarkable in The Buried Giant—he takes the trappings of Arthurian fantasy and uses them to ask the most tender, devastating questions about love and memory. An elderly couple journeys through a Britain shrouded in a strange mist of forgetting, and what they're really searching for broke my heart wide open. This is a quiet book, a slow book, and if you let it, it will stay with you for years. I think about Axl and Beatrice more often than I'd like to admit.
Ada Brief
AI reading intelligence“Divisive and strange and utterly worth it. Ishiguro asks what we owe each other in forgetting — and the answer wrecked me.”
The Mist That Makes Us Forget
Ishiguro does something remarkable in The Buried Giant—he takes the trappings of Arthurian fantasy and uses them to ask the most tender, devastating questions about love and memory. An elderly couple journeys through a Britain shrouded in a strange mist of forgetting, and what they're really searching for broke my heart wide open. This is a quiet book, a slow book, and if you let it, it will stay with you for years. I think about Axl and Beatrice more often than I'd like to admit.
Book Details
- Publisher
- Vintage Books
- Published
- January 1, 2016
- Pages
- 368
- Language
- English
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Ada’s Score
4.1
Ada’s editorial score — not an aggregate of reader reviews.
Common Questions About The Buried Giant
- Is The Buried Giant worth reading?
- Divisive and strange and utterly worth it. Ishiguro asks what we owe each other in forgetting — and the answer wrecked me. Ada rates it 4.1 out of 5.
- How many pages is The Buried Giant?
- The Buried Giant is 368 pages long — around 7–8 hours at an average reading pace.
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