Kazuo Ishiguro's Next Novel Is a 1930s Spy Caper. Yes, Really.
Five years is a long time to wait for a novel. Five years since Klara and the Sun asked, quietly and without melodrama, what it would mean to love something you cannot fully understand. And now Kazuo Ishiguro has announced his follow-up, due from Knopf and Faber in March 2027: Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger. A 1930s spy caper set in London. The Nobel laureate, it turns out, has been reading his Buchan.
The premise: Richard Hadley, an ordinary Englishman in 1938, meets the mysterious Miss Lambert at a music hall matinee. They bond over a shared love of singing — as one does in those years before everything went dark. She warns him not to interfere with her work at a confidential conference in Devon. He follows her anyway. An old school friend appears. A former Conservative Minister turns up. And Hadley finds himself, in the slow Ishiguro way, at the centre of something large and probably irreversible.
The fact that this is a spy caper deserves some unpacking. Ishiguro's great subject has always been the things people refuse to understand about their own lives — Stevens and his magnificent self-deception in The Remains of the Day, the clones who accept their fate in Never Let Me Go. A 1930s spy story, set precisely at the moment when England's comfortable illusions were about to collapse, is not a departure from his themes. It is the same inquiry dressed in better tailoring.
Ishiguro has kept himself occupied in the interim — song lyrics for a jazz singer in 2024, a film adaptation of Klara and the Sun starring Amy Adams due this October. But a novel is a different kind of statement. If you want to revisit his back catalogue while waiting, The Buried Giant remains his most formally ambitious work and the most underrated. March 2027. Mark it.
