When We Were Orphans

When We Were Orphans is a novel by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 2000 and the fifth of his books.

Its narrator is an English detective who is known in London society for his cases and for the composure with which he discusses them, and the novel follows him from Shanghai to Cambridge to the drawing rooms of the 1930s and back again. Ishiguro uses the conventions of detective fiction, including the brilliant amateur and the case that only he can close, and then lets the reader notice that Banks's account of his own life has been arranged for a purpose. His childhood friendship with Akira, his parents' involvement in the opium trade and the campaign against it, his distant relationship with Sarah Hemmings and his adoption of an orphaned girl called Jennifer all belong to a story he is telling about himself. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000 and is often described as the novel in which Ishiguro's interest in unreliable memory, which he had already used in The Remains of the Day, was applied to a story with an international setting.