The Buried Giant is a fantasy novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published in March 2015.

[3][4] The novel follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories.

Along with everyone else in their community, Axl and Beatrice, an elderly Briton couple, suffer from severe selective amnesia that they call the "mist".

They meet the elderly Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, who – as is well known – was tasked decades ago with slaying the she-dragon Querig, but who has never succeeded.

As an experienced warrior, Wistan realises that the monastery was originally built as a fort, and he makes use of its structure to trap and kill the soldiers.

Arthur also ordered that Querig be brought to the lair where she now lives, and that a spell be cast, turning her breath into an oblivion-inducing mist, causing the Saxons to forget about the massacres.

He declares that "the giant, once well buried, now stirs": his action will cause the old animosities between Saxon and Briton to return, leading to a new war.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2014, he recalled that his wife, Lorna MacDougall, had rejected an early draft of the book, saying: "This won't do ... there's no way you can carry on with this, you'll have to start again from the beginning.

[4] It was six years before Ishiguro returned to The Buried Giant, and, following his wife's advice, he proceeded to "start from scratch and rebuild it from the beginning".

He told The New York Times that he had wanted to write about collective memory and the way warrior societies cope with traumatic events by forgetting.

[8] In The Guardian, British author and journalist Alex Preston wrote:[9] Focusing on one single reading of its story of mists and monsters, swords and sorcery, reduces it to mere parable; it is much more than that.

The Buried Giant is Game of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the Stone for the age of the trauma industry, a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget.Not all critics praised the novel, however.

[10] James Wood in The New Yorker criticized the work, saying that "Ishiguro is always breaking his own rules, and fudging limited but conveniently lucid recollections.

"[13] Le Guin in turn responded, writing, in part: "I am delighted to let Mr Ishiguro make his own case, and to say I am sorry for anything that was hurtful in my evidently over-hasty response to his question 'Will they think this is fantasy?

[5] In January 2023, director Guillermo del Toro revealed in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that he had plans to write, produce and direct a stop-motion animated film adaptation of the novel.