Ogres, pixies, dragons, goblins... Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years is a strange beast indeed

If you’d been asked at the beginning of the year whose new novel would feature ogres, pixies and a she-dragon called Querig, I suspect you might have taken a while to guess that the answer was Kazuo Ishiguro. Admittedly, since his career-establishing 1980s triumphs with An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro has been at some pains to distance himself from poignant, perfectly-wrought narratives by uptight self-deceivers who find themselves on the wrong side of history.

There was, for example, the long, dream-like and famously punishing The Unconsoled. More rewardingly, Never Let Me Go — published ten years ago — took place in an alternative Nineties world in which clones were created to act as organ donors. Even so, it’s hard not to feel a degree of sympathy with his clearly rather baffled American publisher, who announced last year that Ishiguro’s forthcoming novel was ‘something of a departure’, which ‘took us all by surprise’.