The Buried Giant
A not particularly successful experiment in evoking amnesia and an anesthetized and passionless world by remixing Arthurian romance into a darker genocide/WMD take on the conquest of England; the hilariously cliched dialogue and prose becomes bland and the reader is anesthetized as well.
Ishiguro does little to build up characters who have no backstories until the end, and lacks the tension of An Artist of the Floating World or The Remains of the Day because the protagonist Axl hardly has anything worth covering up or that he rightly regrets, stripping away the drama of gradually uncovering the mystery.
I wound up being entertained and reading it in just a few sittings because I kept reading in plot twists to come and in particular, expecting Axl to turn out to be Arthur himself—because I couldn’t see how any story worth the telling would emerge without Arthur—and then the real story would kickstart and the artifices be dropped. But Arthur never does, Axl turns out to be just one of his knights, and the real story never begins and the disappointing story simply ends.