Never Let Me Go author Kazuo Ishiguro has announced his first new novel since the 2021 release Klara and the Sun.
Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger will be published worldwide next March, publisher Faber has said – revealing that the book will be set in a time and place familiar to fans of Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.
The new novel is built around an encounter between the mysterious title character and a music hall aficionado in London in 1938, the year before World War II.
It is being billed by Faber as “exquisite entertainment in which nothing is quite as it seems”.
Angus Cargill, Faber’s publishing director and Ishiguro’s editor, said: “Drawing on his love of music, art and Golden Age cinema, this disarming and memorable caper offers a delicious new twist to Ishiguro’s work. We can’t wait for readers to climb aboard.”
Jordan Pavlin, editor-in-chief at the author’s US publisher Knopf, added: “One feels palpable joy in the exploits of the novel’s characters, in their innate goodness and irresistible acts of heroism, in the innocence and vivaciousness that literally has them bursting into song. I defy any reader to resist Miss Lambert’s charms.”
Ishiguro was born in Japan in 1954 and moved to the UK at the age of five. His work has been translated into over 50 languages, with millions of copies sold worldwide.
The 72-year-old has received many prestigious honours, including the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize, the latter for his 1989 release The Remains of the Day.
A number of his novels have also been adapted for the silver and small screens, with a 1993 adaptation of The Remains of the Day – starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins – earning eight Oscar nominations.
Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield then took centre stage in a 2010 film adaptation of the tearjerker Never Let Me Go and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro is currently developing a stop-motion animated adaptation of Ishiguro's 2015 fantasy novel The Buried Giant.
Taika Waititi's film adaptation of Klara and the Sun, starring Amy Adams and Jenna Ortega, will be released in October.
Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger will be released by Faber on 9 March 2027.
