When We Were Orphans
Christopher Banks, a celebrated London detective, returns in 1937 to Shanghai's International Settlement, where both his parents vanished when he was a boy. He is certain the case of his own childhood can be solved the way he solves others, even as the city falls to war around him. The narrator's confident memory is the book's central doubtful instrument, and it is Ishiguro's pastiche of the golden-age detective story turned to elegy.
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Genre
Plot type
Conflict
Culture / tradition
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