To explore the geology of our literary times one needs to interrogate layers of thinking before unearthing the stratum of authors’ motivations. Digging into the motives of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but has lived in England since he was five, one can divine a number of explanations of why he writes: his fascination with how much of us is shaped by our particular historical moment; his view that he had peaked by his 30s. These two probably explain why Ishiguro’s defining phase is the one that begins with his first two novels that piece together the fragments of a Japan he had known as a child and ends with a masterpiece of private agonies – The Remains of the Day. In parsing themes of class, tradition and duty Ishiguro found a distinct voice. Yet he appeared to discard it. Instead his 35-year, seven-book career has continually broken new ground – his last novel was an exploration of national forgetting and individual memory set in a semi-mythical Arthurian England where dragons roam. His work finds emotional force through self-restraint. In an Ishiguro novel, the words on the page are the tip of the iceberg: so much is happening underneath, usually without the characters’ own knowledge. He never writes the same book twice: his previous novel Never Let Me Go was about clones slowly coming to grips with the fact they have been created as organ donors: a philosophical investigation into mortality and meaning. Ishiguro’s novels illuminate reality in profound, surprising ways worthy of a Nobel.