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Library Journal
Atmosphere, historical detail, suspense Ishiguro's new book has it all, and if the parts finally don't add up, the author should still be credited with providing another great read. He should also be credited with originality, for though he investigates the polarities of insider-outsider, English-foreign, as he has done before (e.g., The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled), he is hardly writing the same book again and again. Here, Christopher Banks is an Englishman born in early 20th-century Shanghai whose parents disappear mysteriously when he is nine. He is escorted to England, grows up to be a famed detective, and returns to Shanghai, convinced that his parents are still alive and that he must find them. The reader is less convinced that Banks is a real detective and wonder how he can entertain the romantic notion that his parents have been held hostage in Shanghai for decades, but the truth behind their disappearance comes as a satisfying surprise. And the writing is just wonderful, at once rich and taut. More writers should take style lessons from Ishiguro.
Kirkus
An eerie, oddly beautiful tale from the internationally acclaimed author revolves around an enigmatic ordeal essentially similar to that undergone in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995). ..... Elegiac, meditative, ultimately emotionally devastating, and the purest expression yet of the author's obsessive theme the buried life unearthed by its contingent interconnection with the passions, secrets, and priorities of unignorable other lives.
Publishers Weekly
Despite some contrived events and a tendency to rework the characterizations and themes of his previous books, Ishiguro's latest novel triumphs.
The Times Literary Supplement - Joyce Carol Oates -
[W]ill linger in the mind as an often fascinating, imaginative work of surpassing intelligence and taste.