NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is “an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness” (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

Klara doesn't have to think twice when a band of itinerant travelers offer her employment with their company. Eager to escape life as the village whore, she joins the expedition knowing only that the ragged wanderers are destined for the wildlands believed to be the ancestral home of their Goddess. Signing on as cook and huntress, she embarks on an adventure that leaves her torn between hope and fear. Aided by an unhelpful wizard, Klara finds herself pursued across nations by rabble-rousing religious zealots and ushered into a journey of self-discovery, tapping into a new world of sexual exploration rather than exploitation. Klara's journey catapults her into the lives of a banished nobleman and an exiled king, either of whom may shatter her heart... or lead to the ultimate betrayal.

It is May 2014, and Dr. Klara Lieberman—forty-nine, single, professor of archaeology at a small liberal arts college in Maine, a contained person living a contained life—has just received a letter from her estranged mother, Bessie, that will dramatically change her life. Her father, she learns—the man who has been absent from her life for the last forty-three years, and about whom she has long been desperate for information—is dead. Has been for many years, in fact, which Bessie clearly knew. But now the Polish government is giving financial reparations for land it stole from its Jewish citizens during WWII, and Bessie wants the money. Klara has little interest in the money—but she does want answers about her father. She flies to Warsaw, determined to learn more. In Poland, Klara begins to piece together her father’s, and her own, story. She also connects with extended family, begins a romantic relationship, and discovers her calling: repairing the hundreds of forgotten, and mostly destroyed, pre-War Jewish cemeteries in Poland. Along the way, she becomes a more integrated, embodied, and interpersonally connected individual—one with the tools to make peace with her past and, for the first time in her life, build purposefully toward a bigger future.

Klara can’t wait to take the coach to Amsterdam for a class trip to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Life for Klara and her older brother Nico has been hard since their father died. Nico helps their mother on their potato farm in the Dutch province of Drenthe, and Klara works at a bakery after school. Nico has dreams of becoming an Olympic skater, and Klara wants to be a poet. Klara feels left out by the other students at her school. Not only is she the only girl in her village with bright red hair, but she is the only student at her school who cannot afford to buy a bicycle. Klara is the first to board the coach; little does she know how her life will be changed by her trip to Amsterdam. Discover how the power of art changes Klara’s life as she becomes the center of her classmates’ attention at the Rijksmuseum and how she learns to appreciate her own uniqueness and the beauty of her home in Drenthe.

The rich seam that is Jansson's adult prose continues with this penultimate collection of short stories, written in her seventies at the height of her Moomin fame and translated into English for the first time. In these light-footed, beautifully crafted yet disquieting stories, Jansson tells of discomfiting encounters, unlooked for connections and moments of isolation that span generations and decades. Letters From Klara proves yet again her mastery of this literary form.

"In 1948, Harry Truman, President of the United States, almost fell through the ceiling of the Blue Room in a bathtub into a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. A team of the nation's top architects was hastily assembled to inspect the White House, and upon seeing the state the old mansion was in, insisted the First Family be evicted immediately. What followed was the biggest home-improvement job the nation had ever seen"--

The book. The first part of the book describes the life of Klara Gereb, a graphic artist in Subotica, Yugoslavia, who perished in Auschwitz. She was raised in a Jewish family in Szabadka, in pre-World War I Hungary, and attended the National Hungarian Royal School of Arts and Crafts in Budapest. Following WWI her home town became Subotica, Yugoslavia. After study tours in Austria, Italy, and France she married Louis Fenyves, manager of a printing plant and newspaper. They had two children. In 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz, where she perished. During the deportation her former cook saved a binder of her graphic work, which she returned to the artist's children. The second part of the book is a catalog of a representative subset of Klara Gereb's surviving work, in five sections: illustrations, etchings, and lithographs; student work; portraits; nature studies; and cityscapes of Budapest, Vienna, Paris, Venice, and Florence.

The April 1945 journey of FDR's funeral train became a thousand-mile odyssey, fraught with heartbreak and scandal. As it passed through the night, few of the grieving onlookers gave thought to what might be happening behind the Pullman shades, where women whispered and men tossed back highballs. Inside was a Soviet spy, a newly widowed Eleanor Roosevelt, who had just discovered that her husband's mistress was in the room with him when he died, all the Supreme Court justices, and incoming president Harry S. Truman who was scrambling to learn secrets FDR had never shared with him. Weaving together information from long-forgotten diaries and declassified Secret Service documents, journalist and historian Robert Klara enters the private world on board that famous train. He chronicles the three days during which the country grieved and despaired as never before, and a new president hammered out the policies that would galvanize a country in mourning and win the Second World War.