Klara is an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered android made to keep a child company. Watching from a shop window, she studies the humans who pass, until she is chosen by Josie, a sick teenage girl. In Josie's home Klara observes family tensions and quietly places her faith in the Sun as a kind of giver of life. Told in Klara's earnest voice, the novel considers love, devotion, loneliness and what it means to be human in an age of advanced technology.