If You Loved Klara and the Sun , You Should Read These 9 Books

I first read Never Let Me Go in 2020, per the suggestion of my sister who never fails with book recommendations. Almost instantly, I read it again. (And then I started a countdown to the release of Klara and the Sun.) Similar to the 2021 work, Ishiguro’s 2005 book takes place in a world that almost looks like one we know. It follows boarding-school children as they navigate friendship dynamics, bullies, and crushes. But over time, the reader learns that there’s something a bit more sinister going on. If you want your heart ripped out in the best way possible, or to read something that will make you think of nothing else for weeks, this one’s for you.

A feminist sci-fi novel told from the perspective of a companion robot (or, lets be real, a sex robot), Sierra Geer’s Annie Bot (2024) is a quick but, at times, challenging read. Annie is a bot designed with one mission in life: to please a man. Her owner can adjust her libido at any given moment, lock her in a closet if he’s unhappy with her, and of course holds the power to get rid of her altogether. As the story unravels she begins to understand her position in the world, questioning her purpose.

If you thought extramarital affairs were hard to stomach, try a book about an extramarital robot affair. Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife (2021) follows an award-winning scientist who discovers that her husband stole her research on human cloning... to create a (more obedient) genetically-engineered clone of her. Eerie.

If the part of Klara and the Sun that caught your attention was the way in which technology created dystopian class divides (or if you count Severance as a favorite show), Sarah Anderson’s 2026 Fallows is for you. The newly-released book follows Natalie, a young woman with no dental insurance and lots of student loans who takes a job as a company’s in-house surrogate, delivering seven babies in ten years to allow executives to become mothers without maternity leave. As she’s coming to an end of her contract, however, she is pulled into a different kind of social experiment.

While there are many examples of robot girlfriends and a prominent one about robot friends, robot siblings is a less frequently explored sub-genre. Silvia Park’s 2025 speculative fiction book, Luminous, is set in a near-future, reunified Korea, where three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—reconnect. This one’s another one that will have you contemplating what it means to be human.

A satirical sci-fi novel, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2024 Service Model follows a high-end robot valet who accidentally kills his human master. If that’s not enough to entice you, perhaps the world the author built will. After the death of his owner, the robot embarks on a journey to see the country for the first time—and discovers a post-apocalyptic landscape with broken institutions and a whole community of robots built to serve a long-gone human race.

S.B. Divya’s 2021 Machinehood is set in 2095, at a time when humans are fed pills that a) keep them alive, and b) keep them competitive with AI. Already an interesting premise, it takes a turn with the introduction of the “Machinehood,” a mysterious part-human, part-machine terrorist group that seeks to rid the world of the pills.

If you loved Klara for her acute observations on human life and the way she represented the all-too-familiar experience of feeling othered, or “alien” in a society, Beautyland fits right in. The novel follows a girl who believes she is an extraterrestrial being, sent from her home planet to report on the findings of human life. It is humorous and full of heart.

Olga Ravn’s 2023 novel The Employees, is told through a log of statements from the human and humanoid crew aboard the Six-Thousand Ship, which is hurtling through space. The passengers aboard the ship start have recently become strangely attached to the objects they’ve just picked up on a recent visit to the planet New Dimensions, eliciting feelings of longing, a desire to belong, and even anger to revolt. Some of the entries are one sentence long while others are much longer, and they can be funny, poignant, or sad. Crucially, it is never revealed who has written each statement.