Kazuo Ishiguro announces 1930s spy caper to be published next year
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- Kazuo Ishiguro's ninth novel, Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger, is set for March publication, announced by UK publisher Faber and US publisher Alfred A. Knopf
- The novel is a spy caper set in 1938, following Richard Hadley as he trails the enigmatic Miss Lambert to a conference at a Devon hotel and then onto a Scotland-bound train, where he meets a school friend and a former Tory minister
- Faber publishing director Angus Cargill described the book as 'a delicious new twist' that draws on Ishiguro's love of music, art, and Golden Age cinema
- Ishiguro won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of Day and is also the author of the bestseller Never Let Me Go; his most recent prose novel was 2021's Klara and the Sun
- An adaptation of Klara and the Sun starring Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams is set for release this October, adding to past film versions of A Pale View of Hills (2025), Never Let Me Go (2010), and The Remains of the Day (1993)
- Ishiguro was born in Japan and moved to Britain aged five, and his most recent book is the song-lyric collection The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, written for American jazz singer Stacey Kent
Why it matters: Ishiguro fans get their first new novel from the Nobel laureate in roughly five years, and the genre shift — from dystopian literary fiction to a 1938 spy caper — marks a clear departure from the territory of Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go. With a film adaptation of Klara and the Sun arriving in October, his profile is positioned for a major commercial moment when the book drops in March.
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