The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant is a fantasy novel by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 2015.

It is set in the years after the death of King Arthur, when Saxons and Britons are living alongside each other in a land where almost nobody can keep hold of a memory. The condition is known as the mist, and it has left Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple in a village of underground chambers, with little more than a certainty that they once had a son. They decide to walk to a village several days away to look for him.

On the way they stay at a Saxon village where two ogres have carried off a boy named Edwin, and they travel on with Wistan, a Saxon warrior who kills the ogres, rescues the boy and then joins them on the road. Because the villagers want Edwin dead for the wound he is carrying and believe it came from an ogre, Wistan intends to leave him somewhere safer than the village, and the couple's errand to find their son becomes bound up with his journey. The novel was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award, both in 2016.