This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. Kooley, Professor of Television Studies at Rowan University in New Jersey, Infra Terry Gross.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Casuo Isha-Gurro is known for his books Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both of which were adapted into popular films.

His latest novel, Clara and the Sun, is now out in paperback.

In reviewing it, our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, described Isha-Gurro as, quote, the master of slowly deepening our awareness of human failing, fragility, and the inevitability of death.

All that, even as he deepens our awareness of what temporary magic it is to be alive in the first place.

Unquote. Clara and the Sun takes place sometime in the near future. Something has created a great disruption in society. Society is stratified.

Privileged people are known as high ranking, while people who have lost their jobs to very smart machines are known as, substituted.

The narrator of the book is a human looking robot, who is part of a class of robots, designed with artificial intelligence to serve as friends to children and teenagers.

It's a society where people are isolated from each other, and children no longer go to school. They learn at home on their devices.

We see the world through the eyes of this artificial friend, Clara, who narrates the novel as she learns about humans and the world around her.

Casuo Isha-Gurro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki, after it was decimated by the atomic bomb and then rebuilt.

When he was five, he moved with his family to England, where he continues to live. Terry Gross spoke to him last year when Clara and the Sun was first published.

Casuo Isha-Gurro, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's been too long, so it's a pleasure to have you back.

There's this book, however, resonance that you didn't even expect it to have because of its release during the pandemic.

Schools are closed, and in your novel, children don't go to school anymore. People are isolated from one another and are interacting through their computers.

They're learning, children are learning on their devices.

Is that something that, did you make any tweaks after the pandemic? I mean, the book is new, you wouldn't have had a lot of time to make changes.

No, no, if there are any reverberations, they're purely coincidental. I've finished the book before the pandemic, and I have to say, it took me completely by surprise.

I didn't know something on this scale was coming up. I couldn't have dreamt that something like this would happen.

Maybe in some other sense, you could say, there's an underlying atmosphere of global crisis and things hitting society.

We're talking about, in the novel, I'm talking about a society that is undergoing profound changes, and it doesn't quite know how to reorganize itself.

I have to say, the narrator of your novel is the artificial friend, Clara, and who wouldn't want a friend as self-sacrificing and devoted as Clara is someone who's programmed to learn everything they can about you and to please you.

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