never let me go by kazuo ishiguro book review

Non-Fiction
Author’s Corner
Reader’s Corner
Writing Guide
Book Marketing Services
Write for us

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Exploring Humanity's Darkest Ethical Boundaries

Publisher: Vintage Books
Genre: Dystopian Science Fiction
First Publication: 2005
Language: English
Setting: Hailsham (United Kingdom), England, United Kingdom
Characters: Kathy H., Ruth, Tommy D.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” is a quiet masterpiece that will burrow under your skin and stay there long after the final page. On its surface, it presents as a melancholic coming-of-age tale following a trio of friends—Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy—as they progress from idyllic school days at the eerily insular Hailsham boarding academy into the harsh awakenings of adulthood. But this haunting novel is so much more than just your standard nostalgic reverie. With deceptively simple prose masking profound explorations of humanity, mortality, and society’s ethics when confronted with scientific innovation’s darker potentials, Ishiguro has crafted a supremely affecting meditation on what it means to lead a life of worth and dignity.

The narrative unfolds as a series of introspective recollections from Kathy, now an “adult carer” in her thirties, who reflects back on her Hailsham upbringing and the gradual disintegration of her lifelong friendships with Ruth and Tommy over the years. As these reminiscences accumulate, a distinctly unsettling and poignant subtext begins to take form implicating the school’s peculiar purpose in raising these “special” students.

While Ishiguro is masterfully economical in parceling out the full revelations of Hailsham’s raison d’être and the larger societal framework these youths have been groomed into, hints of their sinister conditioning steadily accrue atmospheric tension. From the sporadic supervising “guardians” to the disturbing “donations” they’re all primed for, an intricate mystery gathers that profoundly alters how we interpret the wistful surface-level nostalgia infusing Kathy’s recollections.

What emerges is a slowly unfolding thought experiment probing disquieting philosophical questions about scientific ethics, authoritarian control, and human dignity’s boundaries in the face of technological overreach. The understated precision in how Ishiguro marries domestic coming-of-age storytelling with grander provocations around mortality and identity is utterly transfixing.

Main Character Analysis:

In Kathy, Ishiguro has crafted one of modern literature’s most disarmingly empathetic and authentic first-person perspectives. The naturalistic simplicity and almost naïve relatability of her reminiscences on the pleasures and pains of schoolyard friendships and burgeoning first love instantly endear us to her interiority. We see the inseparable bonds forged with Ruth and Tommy through tiny observational details only known to the closest of friends.

Yet Ishiguro injects undercurrents of melancholy and muted acceptance laced through even Kathy’s warmest reveries – emotional textures that steadily coalesce into rich layers of subtext hinting at her deeper reservoirs of heartbreak, self-deception, and inner resilience. She emerges as both an empathetic person and piercingly nuanced conveyor of universal human longings for love, meaning, and transcendence in the face of suffering.

Crucially, the author invests Kathy with such authenticity and understated grace that even as the story’s sinister dystopian dimensions crystallize, she never becomes a symbolic vehicle for easy moralizing or philosophical posturing. Her wistful tone and contradictions mirror our own all-too-human struggles with harsh truths while her dignity and small assertions of selfhood in the face of systemic dehumanization radiate quiet, inextinguishable power.

Writing Style:

From the opening pages, Ishiguro casts an inescapable melancholic spell with his sparse, unsentimental yet immensely rich prose style. The spareness and emotional restraint of his narration perfectly captures Kathy’s self-effacing wistfulness while belying vast internal oceans of unspoken alienation and grief roiling beneath his characters’ serene facades.

He sequences each mundane reminiscence or character interaction with such exquisite deliberateness and granular specificity that every detail becomes imbued with chilling symbolic resonance by his story’s end. An unassuming mastery that hauntingly unspools beneath you with each meditative passage, making the ultimate revelations and silences hit like sledgehammers to the soul.

Beneath the meditative surface-level reveries and coming-of-age trappings, “Never Let Me Go” ultimately congeals into a richly provocative philosophical rumination on humanity’s ethics concerning scientific innovation and advancement at any moral or existential cost. Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and their fellow Hailsham students personify the full spectrum of human dignity discarded when society privileges institutional control and technological progress over the sanctity of life itself.

Ishiguro embeds subversive threads questioning the norms by which we categorize personhood, individuality, and even the souls we may be condemning to effective living death through collective complacency. The sinister subtext of these special children being groomed into organ donor farms touches existential nerves over the value we assign undesirable social classes and how easily systematic dehumanization can take root through bureaucratic efficiencies.

Yet the author roots these heady critiques with palpable emotional stakes in the intimate humanity and soul anguish we witness these constrained characters enduring. Their tragedy lies not just in their fates but the resilience and beauty they summon in asserting identity beyond society’s merciless scripts for them. Ishiguro beckons reckoning with technology’s spiritual void if divorced from our core ethics.

What People Are Saying:

Since its release, “Never Let Me Go” has cemented Ishiguro’s status as one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary fiction authors. Lavished with praise for its restrained poignancy, rich themes around mortality and human worth, and disquieting social allegory, it has emerged a true modern masterwork.

While occasionally faulted for tonal unevenness or characters that can feel like mere thematic apparatuses, most reviewers agree Ishiguro has produced a quiet yet profound triumph. One that lingers in the conscience long after its ostensibly unassuming narrative ends with a visceral cathartic impact few other novels can match.

My Personal Take:

I vividly remember powering through “Never Let Me Go” during a lonely bout of insomnia one sleepless night when I was deep in the throes of a depressive spiral stemming from my own suppressed childhood traumas. As someone who’d been drawn to Ishiguro’s reserved yet soulful body of work precisely for how his narratives seemed to distill universal aches about existential longing, transience, and what leaves an enduring human mark on the world, I wasn’t prepared for how utterly this particular novel would emotionally dismantle me.

From the opening passages detailing Kathy’s tender recollections of her earliest days at Hailsham’s idyllic campus, there was something about the poetic sparseness and underlying elegiac hues suffusing Ishiguro’s immaculate yet humble prose style that just hooked itself directly into my melancholic psychological wavelengths. But then, as subtle revelations about the sinister shadows looming over these cherished adolescent memories and the sterile institutional environment Kathy had normalized began accruing disquieting resonance, I felt the thematic floodgates opening as the story progressed.

Few authors have ever channeled the sheer emotional devastation of having one’s fundamental human worth and individuality systemically invalidated and stripped away by dehumanizing societal constructs as staggeringly as Ishiguro does here. As I found myself drowning in complex swirls of anger, existential dread, and ultimately overwhelming empathy for the quiet graces Kathy still summons in clinging to each cherished memory and reclaiming identity, I was utterly transfixed. Each wistful recollection, every darkly amusing bit of friends’ banter, every stifled eruption of cataclysmic heartbreak suddenly congealed into this profoundly piercingly vision for me about the stifling inheritances of codified societal dehumanization that still paralyze us all in different ways.

Even days after finishing the final pages, that hollowed yet cathartic sensation of an old emotional blockage being unearthed stayed lodged in my psyche. Ishiguro had gently but powerfully prodded me into confronting my own buried wounds in the most sublime way – not through overt melodrama, but by tenderly dignifying the souls and small gestures of transcendent selfhood Kathy and Ruth and Tommy fought to preserve no matter what indignities society attempted to strip from them. A shattering reminder that beauty, meaning, and identity’s essential urgencies can never be invalidated if we bravely assert them.

Wrapping It Up:

Quiet but with reverberations that will leave you forever changed, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” emerges as a subtly astonishing literary landmark. What initially presents as a mournful coming-of-age romance steadily morphs into one of the most searing philosophical provocations around scientific ethics, systemic dehumanization, and what makes a life of real consequence when all dignity has been stripped away.

Yet for all its heady allegorical potency, this novel cuts deepest through Ishiguro’s supreme emotional acuity and gift for rendering the small human moments of grace and identity-assertion as both cathartic salve and eternal reminder of our individual resilience’s boundless urgency. A quiet masterwork that will linger for lifetimes.

Readers also enjoyed

The coworker by freida mcfadden, slow dance by rainbow rowell, heartless hunter by kristen ciccarelli, you shouldn’t have come here by jeneva rose, the briar club by kate quinn, popular stories, one day, life will change by saranya umakanthan, most famous fictional detectives from literature, the complete list of the booker prize winner books, book marketing and promotion services.

We provide genuine and custom-tailored book marketing services and promotion strategies. Our services include book reviews and social media promotion across all possible platforms, which will help you in showcasing the books, sample chapters, author interviews, posters, banners, and other promotional materials. In addition to book reviews and author interviews, we also provide social media campaigning in the form of contests, events, quizzes, and giveaways, as well as sharing graphics and book covers. Our book marketing services are very efficient, and we provide them at the most competitive price.

The Book Marketing and Promotion Plan that we provide covers a variety of different services. You have the option of either choosing the whole plan or customizing it by selecting and combining one or more of the services that we provide. The following is a list of the services that we provide for the marketing and promotion of books.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews have direct impact on readers while they are choosing their next book to read. When they are purchasing book, most readers prefer the books with good reviews. We’ll review your book and post reviews on Amazon, Flipkart, Goodreads and on our Blogs and social-media channels.

Author Interviews

We’ll interview the author and post those questions and answers on blogs and social medias so that readers get to know about author and his book. This will make author famous along with his book among the reading community.

Social Media Promotion

We have more than 170K followers on our social media channels who are interested in books and reading. We’ll create and publish different posts about book and author on our social media platforms.

Social Media Set up

Social Media is a significant tool to reaching out your readers and make them aware of your work. We’ll help you to setup and manage various social media profiles and fan pages for your book.

We’ll provide you our social media marketing guide, using which you may take advantage of these social media platforms to create and engage your fan base.

Website Creation

One of the most effective and long-term strategies to increase your book sales is to create your own website. Author website is must have tool for authors today and it doesn’t just help you to promote book but also helps you to engage with your potential readers. Our full featured author website, with blog, social media integration and other cool features, is the best marketing tool you can have. You can list each of your titles and link them to buy from various online stores.

Google / Facebook / Youtube Adverts

We can help you in creating ad on Google, Facebook and Youtube to reach your target audience using specific keywords and categories relevant to your book.

With our help you can narrow down your ads to the exact target audience for your book.

For more details mail us at [email protected]

The Bookish Elf is your single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of literary life. The Bookish Elf is a site you can rely on for book reviews, author interviews, book recommendations, and all things books. Contact us: [email protected]

Quick Links

Or browse by category:

Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

never let me go by kazuo ishiguro book review

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Never let me go.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 1 Review
Kids Say 3 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Gripping sci-fi paints teens' bleak, unforgettable world.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 13+?

Characters talk a lot about having sex, and it is mentioned that some couples ha

The sci-fi world of Never Let Me Go, particularly at the Hailsham boarding schoo

Tommy is emotionally on edge and throws temper tantrums during which he screams

Any Positive Content?

Kathy, the central character in Never Let Me Go, shows real compassion and under

Many of the characters have real affection for one another and develop close rel

It's important to separate fantasy from reality here. Though Ishiguro blends

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Characters talk a lot about having sex, and it is mentioned that some couples have sex. One guardian educates her students about the mechanics of sexual intercourse, and encourages her students not to become sexually involved unless it is with someone with whom they feel emotionally connected. In one scene, a woman briefly describes masturbating her boyfriend.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The sci-fi world of Never Let Me Go , particularly at the Hailsham boarding school, has its own strange economic system. Students trade "tokens" for items they find in "sales." Within this context, the students place a high value on certain possessions, which they collect and display.

Violence & Scariness

Tommy is emotionally on edge and throws temper tantrums during which he screams and swears at other kids who tease him.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Kathy, the central character in Never Let Me Go , shows real compassion and understanding toward her friends. Despite the fact that her closest girlfriend, Ruth, often lies and manipulates people, Kathy always tries to see Ruth's point of view, and she is kind to the volatile Tommy even when he is ostracized by most other students. Some of the adult teachers, called "guardians," are also kind and concerned. Miss Lucy wants to reveal more information to her students because she believes this is most fair to them. Miss Emily and Madame care a great deal about the students' quality of life.

Positive Messages

Many of the characters have real affection for one another and develop close relationships in spite of their bleak prospects. The novel also places a high value on artistic creativity as a sign of humanity.

Educational Value

It's important to separate fantasy from reality here. Though Ishiguro blends some real English geography into the science fiction world he creates, almost all of the places in Never Let Me Go are pure inventions.

Parents need to know that Never Let Me Go is set in a highly disturbing sci-fi reality in which young people try to make sense of their relationships and an increasingly hopeless world. The author introduces a host of invented, unnatural roles: students, guardians, careers, and donors, and slowly reveals what these labels mean. However, most of the interpersonal situations that crop up are fairly believable, typical adolescent scenarios, and tween and teen readers may identify with the central characters. Though this book, by one of England's most acclaimed living novelists, was written for an adult audience, the teen and young adult characters make it appealing to younger readers, and the prose is simple and straightforward enough to make it accessible to readers aged 12 and up. However, some parents may feel the book's sexual content is too strange for pre-teen readers. A film version of Never Let Me Go received positive reviews when it was released in 2010 (out on video in 2011), but was rightfully called very dark and depressing.

Where to Read

Parent and kid reviews.

Parents say (1)
Kids say (3)

Based on 1 parent review

Fascinating social sci-fi

What's the story.

Now a young woman, Kathy reflects on her life as a child and as a teen at Hailsham, the exclusive English boarding school she attended. She recalls the intimate relationships she forged with Ruth, whose lies tested their friendship, and Tommy, a troubled and sensitive outcast. Over time, the three central characters uncover the truth about their guardians, their fate, and what they mean to each other.

Is It Any Good?

Readers are kept on very much the same footing as the central characters; we experience the same kind of suspense as the dark, disturbing reality they face unfolds, and it's gripping. As he famously proved in his Man Booker Award-winning novel Remains of the Day (1989), Ishiguro is a master of restraint; he holds back just enough to create emotional tension, so even his least eventful plots become page-turners. Though Never Let Me Go is not a masterpiece on the order of Remains , it is thought-provoking and creates a fully realized, horrific, unforgettable world.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about human cloning, which figures in the story. If such a thing were possible in the real world, should it be done?

Do you agree with Miss Lucy that students should have been told more about their future lives and purpose? Why or why not?

In many ways, Kathy and her friends seem like pretty typical teenagers. What do you think makes them seem "normal," or not?

Kathy and Ruth's relationship is quite troubled. Why do you think Kathy forgives Ruth so much?

Book Details

Author : Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Friendship
Book type : Fiction
Publisher : Vintage Books
Publication date : March 14, 2006
Number of pages : 304
Last updated : June 17, 2015

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Wither: The Chemical Garden Trilogy, Book 1

The Knife of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking, Book 1

The Adoration of Jenna Fox: The Jenna Fox Chronicles, Book 1

Science fiction books, science fiction tv, related topics.

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro.

‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro was published in 2005 and is regarded as one of the best books of the early 20th century.

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The novel is a challenging read, not so much for the style of writing it contains but due to the ethical and moral issues it presents and the truly emotional narrative that plays out within the text. Readers are more than likely going to find themselves getting attached to Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth and struggling to comprehend the world they’re growing up in.

Character Analysis

The central character in ‘Never Let Me Go’ is Kathy. She’s the narrator of the novel and the person whose perspective tints everything one learns about the world. She spends the novel trying to understand her youth and make sense of the role she’s playing now and will play in the future.

She delivers a narrative that’s simple but filled with feelings of nostalgia and melancholy. She is an introspective person and this bleeds into Ishiguro’s depiction of her through her narrative. This is particularly effective when she speaks about her role as a carer later in the novel. She has a deep understanding of human emotions and an ability to connect to people — two things that those who implemented the clone program would prefer not to acknowledge about her and all those like her.

Other characters seen in the novel are depicted through Kathy’s understanding of them. These include her two closest friends, Tommy and Ruth. Tommy is someone who evolves throughout the novel. At times, he’s temperamental and vulnerable (particularly as it concerns his art, which he’s teased about). He and Kathy always care for one another, but it’s not too late in the book that the extent of their feelings is revealed.

Ruth is another complicated character who, it could be argued, is the hardest to understand in the book. She has a profound sense of insecurity and a deep desire for acceptance and normalcy. She tries to accomplish this by demonstrating her knowledge about the clones’ situation but is often incorrect or makes assumptions she can’t back up.

Ishiguro’s Style and Writing Techniques

Ishiguro is known for his understated writing style. His prose is often deceptively simple and devoid of the lyrical flourishes seen in other writers’ work. Kathy’s narrative voice is calm and level throughout the novel, but she is not without more reflective and introspective moments.

This creates a subdued and intimate tone, allowing readers to connect to the various characters in a meaningful way. Much of the novel plays out through memories, as well. This means that there are times in which nostalgia influences the events being described and moments in which readers may not be able to trust Kathy’s depiction of events.

She proves herself to be an unreliable narrator in certain points of the book, but this is something that makes the story all the more compelling. Readers are left in the dark about certain issues and allowed to understand them at the same time that the characters do. The narration and Ishiguro’s overall style often leave elements ambiguous and open to interpretation. This allows readers to engage with the text and form their own opinions of the story and its themes.

Philosophical Content

One of the more memorable elements of the novel is how the characters’ personal lives create commentary on the plot’s moral and ethical issues. The entire book is centered around the issue of cloning and how, in a worst-case-scenario, these clones could be used.

The clones are utilized for organ harvesting against their will and are created for this sole purpose. This leads to a broader discussion on the ethics of sacrificing a few for the greater good and the dehumanization that can come with scientific advancements.

The novel forces readers to consider what they would feel if they were in the clones’ position or what their stance on the entire issue of cloning is. Ishiguro also explores the topic of free will throughout the novel. He asks whether true agency is even possible under the constrained circumstances the clones grow up in. Readers are also likely going to be inspired to consider what the characters’ acceptance of their fate means. Is it complicity or purely a coping mechanism?

Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro's Commentary on Cloning

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Book Illustration

Book Title: Never Let Me Go

Book Description: 'Never Let Me Go' challenges readers to comprehend a world in which cloning is legal and utilized for the sole purpose of creating a source of viable organs.

Book Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Knopf

Date published: September 5, 2005

ISBN: 978-0-375-40251-0

Number Of Pages: 288

Lasting Effect on Reader

Never Let Me Go Review

‘Never Let Me Go’ is a stunning and highly memorable book that’s certainly one of the best novels of the early 20th century. It focuses on a dystopian future in which clones are created for the single purpose of organ harvesting.

Incredibly memorable story
Beautiful prose
Deeply relevant
Likely to leave readers with questions
Frustrating characters

Join Our Community for Free!

Exclusive to Members

Create Your Personal Profile

Engage in Forums

Join or Create Groups

Save your favorites, beta access.

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

About the Book

Discover literature, enjoy exclusive perks, and connect with others just like yourself!

Start the Conversation. Join the Chat.

There was a problem reporting this post.

Block Member?

Please confirm you want to block this member.

You will no longer be able to:

See blocked member's posts
Mention this member in posts
Invite this member to groups

Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.

Yorkshire Times

Review: Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

US Edition Change

US election 2024
US Politics
UK Politics
News Videos
Rugby Union
Sports Videos
Photography
Theatre & Dance
Culture Videos
Food & Drink
Health & Families
Royal Family
Electric Vehicles
Lifestyle Videos
News & Advice
Simon Calder
Inspiration
City Guides
Sustainable Travel
Politics Explained
News Analysis
Home & Garden
Fashion & Beauty
Travel & Outdoors
Sports & Fitness
Climate 100
Sustainable Living
Climate Videos
Electric vehicles
Behind The Headlines
On The Ground
Decomplicated
You Ask The Questions
Binge Watch
Travel Smart
Watch on your TV
Crosswords & Puzzles
Most Commented
Newsletters
Ask Me Anything
Virtual Events

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Artist of a floating world, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Support truly independent journalism

Find out more close.

Our mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth. Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts. Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.

Louise Thomas

FABER & FABER £16.99 (263pp) £15.99 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

Kazuo Ishiguro is a master storyteller, in a class of his own making. In this, his sixth and strangest novel, his narrative brilliance depends, as always, on over-simplicity, a highly provocative idiom which embraces both the prosaic and the prissy. Innumerable sleights of hand, sly flash-forwards, almost psychotic bits of underwriting and a multitude of red herrings combine to make the reader ache with curiosity about what happened earlier and what happens next.

Ostensibly - but this is surely just another massive Ishiguro tease - Never Let Me Go is about a group of genetically-engineered or test-tube children living in a comfortable country house called Hailsham. Here there is a sports pavilion and a playing field, and the students do ordinary things like playing rounders. One little girl even has a gorgeous, luscious pencil case with a furry pom-pom attached to its zip...

Quite so, but from the uneasy opening lines onwards, we know there is something special about these children. They have no parents, no surnames, they never go on holiday, they will never have babies of their own. They are, in fact, being exclusively bred to become "donors".

The exact meaning of this sinister word is not made clear until page 73, when one of their more outspoken guardians suddenly blurts it all out. "None of you will go to America," she tells her charges. "None of you will be film stars... Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then... you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do."

This thoroughly macabre tale is told by a pupil called Kathy in a schoolgirlish or nurse-like vernacular, at times brooding, mawkish, wearisome or poignantly cheery. She focuses particularly on her relationship with two fellow students, Tommy and Ruth. The bonds of loyalty between them, the allegiance and camaraderie - old Ishiguro themes - provide the book with its title. The hold they exercise on each other, and on the reader, becomes tighter as the story proceeds.

The dreadfulness of the subject matter - even Kathy admits at one point, "It's horror movie stuff" - is rubbed in by the perkily banal language. The rain comes "bucketing down", people "don't have the faintest", and sections begin with preambles like, "This might all sound daft but...". From time to time, the reader is dragged in, if not fatally compromised, by asides like, "I don't know how it was where you were...".

After a while, the story moves away from Hailsham - the name has its own eerie resonance and double meanings - but into an only marginally wider world. Kathy is now a carer, still closely involved with Tommy and Ruth, and hurrying between various "recovery centres" where she helps uncomplaining donors through their suicidally heroic ordeals. Donors, incidentally, do not "die". They "complete".

The narrator's time on the roads echoes the love-sick butler's odyssey in The Remains of the Day . She often sleeps in an "overnight" and sits alone in motorway cafeterias. Ishiguro's England is a simplified and desolate place, featureless apart from the odd bus shelter - wasn't there a significant bus shelter in the butler's story? - and such comically downbeat things as the shadowy reflections you see in hospital floors or "double glazed windows which seal at the touch of a handle".

The relish with which such matters are described is central to Ishiguro's art, but their incorporation into the text is done with such enigmatic grace and lightness of touch, such naturalness, that the reader may be forgiven for sometimes wondering if they are reflections of the author's own character and taste. Ishiguro undoubtedly has an artist's double vision. Perhaps he is also genuinely interested in double-glazing? If this is so, does it make his naively innocent pose somewhat artificial? It is also tempting to ask if Ishiguro's use of red herrings is a form of genius or evidence of a wandering mind.

In this novel, he frequently builds up the tension with appetite-whetting references to offstage noises, unexplained things on people's sleeves or - as in his first novel, A Pale View of Hills - caught around people's feet. Such diversions seem to have no direct bearing on the plot but their accumulated effect is so invigorating that it hardly matters if these are meticulously calculated master strokes or, just occasionally, actual slips of the pen.

Halfway through, Kathy and her two chums even pay a typically irrelevant but highly disturbing token visit to some symbolic marshland, a chilling reminder of the wistful landscape featured in A Pale View of Hills . This is the only occasion in Never Let Me Go when the author reverts to the Japanese-ness that characterised his early work and the dreaminess in which some critics feel he over-indulged in his mightily ambitious novel, The Unconsoled .

The narrative is rendered even more exciting by the fact that none of these poor doomed "clones" fights their fate. Have they been brain-washed not to care?

A brief flutter of interest is created by a chance encounter with a woman from whom Kathy's friend Ruth might possibly have been cloned, but their origins are of only passing interest to them. "Look down the toilet," declares Tommy after this last episode. "That's where you'll find we all come from."

In an utterly riveting final scene, which takes place in Littlehampton of all places (more Ishiguro playfulness?), our heroes have a meeting with the two high-minded women who set up Hailsham. Here the author introduces a beautiful red herring in the shape of a mysterious bedside cabinet which is being heaved down some stairs and taken off in a white van.

This is all very suggestive, all very medical, but Never Let Me Go has as little to do with genetic engineering and the cloning controversy as The Remains of the Day has to do with butlering or When We Were Orphans to do with detective work.

Ishiguro is primarily a poet. Accuracy of social observation, dialogue and even characterisation is not his aim. In this deceptively sad novel, he simply uses a science-fiction framework to throw light on ordinary human life, the human soul, human sexuality, love, creativity and childhood innocence.

He does so with devastating effect, gently hinting that we are all, to some extent, clones, all copycats and mimics who acquire our mannerisms from the TV and cinema screens, even advertisements, as much as from our elders and betters. And, more frighteningly, that we are all, to some extent, pawns in someone else's game, our lives set out for us.

Andrew Barrow's 'Quentin and Philip' is published by Pan

Buy any book reviewed on this site at
- postage and packing are in the UK

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

My Independent Premium
Account details
Help centre

Thanks for visiting my little slice of the internet. I’m so glad you’re here.

Let's be friends.

Aug 31 Never Let Me Go

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro Publisher: Vintage Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop , which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here .

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro comes a devastating novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss.

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules—and teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.

Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life, and for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them so special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day .

TL;DR Review

Never Let Me Go is a quietly eerie, thought-provoking book with a strong first-person narrator. It’s engaging and will stick with you long after you finish it.

For you if: You like books that ask ethical questions.

Full Review

I’m late to the Ishiguro party (my first book of his was Klara and the Sun) , but several people recommended Never Let Me Go as a beloved backlist title of his. I went in with few expectations and little knowledge about the plot, which I think was a good way to do it. I definitely enjoyed it, but it’s also proven to be one of those books you appreciate even more as time goes by and you think back about it later.

I won’t give too much away, but the book is written in the first person by a character named Kathy H. She’s speaking directly to us, her readers, telling us a mostly linear account of her time at school with her friends, and then what happened to them as they aged. That makes it sound boring and straightforward, but the society that Kathy lives in is not quite like our own, and she and her friends are not like you and me (except they also are, which is kind of the point).

Once again, Ishiguro has blown me away by his ability to write for an entire book in a very distinct character voice; Kath and Klara sound nothing like one another, and wholly like themselves. Going by prose alone, you might not even know it was the same author. But of course, it’s all Ishiguro, and the two books have similar thematic threads, both being a sort of subversion of the dystopian genre in which there are troubling technological advancements and humanitarian issues at play, but no attempts to "overthrow” them. Only a sort of melancholy acceptance that makes the books even more disquieting. This one, in particular, makes you think more about how you may be a cog in a machine, what you may be complacent in, and how much agency you actually have. That, and ethics in modern (and future) medicine.

The one thing that bothered me about this book was how Kathy H. constantly told us she was about to tell us something. It seemed like every few pages she was like, “or at least that’s what I thought … until what happened next” (implied DUN DUN DUUUUN). But ultimately that’s a small complaint.

While I’m not sure this became an all-time favorite like it was for some of my friends, I’m really glad I read it and definitely recommend it. It’s one that will stick with you for a long time.

Content and Trigger Warnings

Infertility

Terminal illness (in a way?)

Death and grief

Sexual content (non-explicit)

Sep 10 The Spear Cuts Through Water

Aug 29 Book Lovers

Okay, NYT Got It Right With This Best of the 21st Century Book Pick

Emily Martin

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at [email protected].

View All posts by Emily Martin

Everyone had their opinions about this list and what books should and shouldn’t have been on there, but this is one I think they definitely got right. So, if, for some reason, you missed out on this book in the first 24 years of this century, make sure you get to it soon!

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I always tell people that it’s best to go into this book knowing as little as possible, so my advice? Don’t read any of this and just go pick up the book. Then come back and tell me what you think because I love talking about this one. There’s just so much going on in this book, and it will leave you with a lot of things to ponder and discuss with others who have read it. If you’re looking for a book club book? This would be an excellent pick. Looking for a book that will make you reconsider the meaning of life and what it means to be human? It’s this book right here. But… if you’re looking for a book that won’t make you cry uncontrollably, maybe set this book down. I’ve read this one many times, and it always leaves me in tears.

Never Let Me Go follows Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, three friends and students at Hailsham Academy, an elite English boarding school. Students of Hailsham are always told they are special and that they have to protect themselves and stay safe at all costs. They are monitored by guardians who encourage them to take good care of themselves. Students of Hailsham seem like normal children in many ways, but they’re also so cut off from the outside world, and they’re not quite sure what makes them so special.

As Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy grow older and explore a world outside of Hailsham, the things that make them different from other people become much clearer. While they do their best to maintain their friendships and love for each other, the real world and their ultimate purposes get in the way of their hopes and dreams of living the lives they want to live.

I know that last part is vague, but again, I think it’s best if you allow yourself to discover the mysteries of Hailsham for yourself. Without giving too much away, I will say Ishiguro is definitely playing with genre in this book. This is definitely a novel I would categorize as speculative fiction. If you like boarding school stories, stories about love and friendship, stories that ask “what if?,” and stories that squeeze your heart and get you in the feels, just trust me. You’re going to love this.

Never Let Me Go was published less than 20 years ago, but, honestly, I would already consider this one a classic. This is a book that we’ll still be reading and discussing for years to come. You’ll want to be a part of that conversation.

Happy weekend reading, bibliophiles! Feel free to follow me on Instagram @emandhercat , and check out my other newsletters, The Fright Stuff and Book Radar !

9 of the Most Polarizing Science Fiction Books to Love or Hate

Writing Advice
Movie Reviews
Book Reviews
Spies and Espionage
Alternative History
Friends Doing Cool Stuff

Email Address

Never Let Me Go: Book Review

Never Let Me Go, written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published in 1992, is one of the greatest alternative history novels ever written. It’s the only alternative history novel ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize and it won many other literary awards.

Never Let Me Go: Title

The title is an allusion to a music album entitled Never Let Me Go by a fictional singer, Judy Bridgewater. The novel’s protagonist loves the album, and her listening to it is a motif that recurs throughout the novel. Using a defining motif in the title is a classic title archetype.

(For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel )

Never Let Me Go: Logline

Three friends, brought up understanding that they will donate their organs and die at a young age, try to find some meaning in their brief lives.

(For more on loglines see The Killogator Logline Formula )

Never Let Me Go: Plot Summary

Warning: My plot summaries contain spoilers. Major spoilers are blacked out like this [blackout]secret[/blackout]. To view them, just select/highlight them.

It’s the late 1990s, in England. Kathy, a carer who looks after ‘donors’ who, it seems, do not survive their donations, reminisces about her time at Hailsham, a boarding school.

Kathy’s two best friends at Hailsham are Ruth and Tommy. Kathy recounts several events from their schooldays, which seem idyllic – learning and playing like any boarding-school children. However, throughout their time at Hailsham, the children know they’re not normal and will eventually become ‘donors’.

A headmistress, known as ‘Miss Emily’, runs the school. The teachers, known as guardians, teach a normal curriculum but with an emphasis on art and keeping healthy. The students exhibit their art, and a woman known as ‘Madame’ takes away the best pieces.

One guardian becomes upset at the students’ vague understanding of their fate. She says the school has brought them up aware of ‘donations’, but without really comprehending the implications. She attempts to explain, but the children still don’t really understand. The guardian leaves the school shortly afterwards.

The Cottages

When they’re sixteen, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy go to a half-way-house called ‘The Cottages’.

Ruth and Tommy started a romantic relationship during their last year at the school and continue it at the Cottages, but Kathy never forms a long-term relationship with anyone.

Two of the older students tell Ruth that they saw a woman who could be her ‘original’ working in an office (thus confirming that the ‘donors’ are clones). They all decide to investigate. During the trip, the two older students say that they’ve heard a rumour that couples from Hailsham can have their donations deferred if they can prove they’re genuinely in a romantic relationship. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy have never heard this rumour.

Tommy and Kathy go off together and find a copy of Kathy’s favourite music tape, which she last had at Hailsham. Tommy also tells Kathy that he suspects rumours about deferments are true and that he believes that Madame uses the art collection to decide if people can have deferments.

Back at the Cottages, Ruth becomes jealous of Tommy and Kathy’s close friendship and starts antagonising Kathy. Hurt by Ruth’s behaviour, Kathy applies to become a carer and moves away from the Cottages.

Kathy becomes a carer and doesn’t see either Ruth or Tommy for many years. During the intervening period, Hailsham closes.

When she hears that Ruth’s donations have started, and that her health is deteriorating fast, Kathy becomes her carer. Some donors manage up to four donations, but Ruth is not strong enough for that, and both Ruth and Kathy suspect Ruth’s second donation will lead to her death.

Ruth wants to meet up with Tommy, who’s in a different donor centre. Kathy arranges a car trip. At first, Kathy and Tommy gang up on Ruth, remembering the thoughtless things she’s done to them both. Ruth, though, is regretful and tells Kathy and Tommy they should get together for whatever time they have left. Also, she has discovered where Madame lives. It’s too late for her, but she urges Kathy and Tommy to ask Madame for one of the rumoured deferrals…

Soon after, [blackout]Ruth makes her second donation and dies. Kathy becomes Tommy’s carer and they become romantically involved. Following Ruth’s wishes, they track Madame down and ask for a deferral.[/blackout]

They discover [blackout]that Madame lives with Miss Emily. The two women tell Kathy and Tommy that there is no such thing as a deferral – the rumour was just wishful thinking by the donors.[/blackout]

In reality, [blackout]Hailsham was part of a failed attempt to show that the donors were being abused. Madame exhibited the gallery of artwork around the country, trying to convince the public that donors were as human as everyone else.[/blackout]

Madame and Miss Emily [blackout] both say they’re sorry, but there’s nothing they can do. Kathy seems to accept this, but Tommy is horrified.[/blackout]

Tommy [blackout]asks Kathy not to be his carer for his final donation as he doesn’t want her to see him die. They part, with Kathy knowing her own donations and death are imminent.[/blackout]

(For more on summarising stories, see How to Write a Novel Synopsis )

Never Let Me Go: Analysis

Warning: inevitably my analysis contains spoilers.

The Alternate History of Never Let Me Go

Never let Me Go is not an alternative history novel in the way most of the novels I review are. There’s no specifically stated point of departure, but it would seem that in the 1950s scientists perfected human cloning and the public waved away ethical concerns. In the 1970s, the small group that ran Hailsham tried to raise the ethical issues but were unsuccessful. Apart from that, the world doesn’t seem to have changed.

This lack of consequences makes the world of Never Let Me Go more of a fantasy world than an alternate history (see What is Alternative History? )

Never let Me Go is not a fast-paced or plot-driven novel. However, Ishiguro uses hinting of problems to come and mild cliffhangers to keep the story interesting and page-turning – it’s not a slow read.

Understated

Kathy narrates the entire novel in the past tense. She’s an unreliable narrator because of her own lack of awareness of the horror of the story. When she talks about the clones’ sad lives in a matter of fact, accepting way, it provokes an emotional response in the reader.

Throughout the story, Kathy and the others seem to just accept their fate. Apart from attempting to seek a ‘deferral’, they don’t try to escape, rebel or protest. They don’t even consider suicide. Ruth is the only one who has any thoughts of doing anything other than becoming a carer and then a donor. She dreams of working in an office like a normal person, although even she realises it’s just a fantasy.

The ‘out of universe’ reason no one tries to run away is that the novel is, as explained above, a metaphor for human life. There’s no ‘running away’ from the fact that we’re all going to die one day. Ask yourself why you accept your fate and you understand why the characters do the same. Where is there to run to?

However, there’s no canonical ‘in universe’ explanation for why the donors accept their fate so passively. However, it’s hinted that they’re tracked and monitored, e.g. they use tags to sign in at the cottages. And of course there may be nowhere to run to, as the same system is likely to be in place anywhere else they could go to.

Another possibility is that society regards the donors as pariahs outside normal society. It may be impossible for donors to get a normal job or housing, legally or due to prejudice. It’s suggested in several scenes in the book that people are scared of and repulsed by the donors. That leaves them with very few options.

Ishiguro himself has said that the donors simply don’t have any concept of ‘running away’ even being a possibility. He’s also said that the entire question of ‘Why don’t they run away?’ only comes up with western audiences.

In the end, the ‘in universe’ explanations are not fully explored, as the author’s purpose is metaphorical.

Reality: Human Cloning Clones have existed throughout history as twins are genetically identical, naturally occurring clones. However, the first artificially cloned animals were born in the 1990s, raising the possibility of artificial human cloning in the future. The ethical issues around the sanctity of life and human rights quickly led to bans on reproductive human cloning worldwide. As reproductive human cloning is illegal, and the use of clones as a supply of organs for transplantation is utterly unethical and against any conception of human rights, ‘harvesting’ of clones is unlikely ever to take place. However, scientists are researching therapeutic cloning of human cells, and lab-grown organs are a possibility for future medicine.

The movie The Island, starring Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor, has the same basic premise as Never Let Me Go , but takes it in a very different, action-orientated-thriller, direction.

In Never let Me Go the protagonists are aware of their fate and, largely, accept it, while in The Island the clones are in what amounts to a prison and the prison authorities tell them that the world outside is a wasteland . Discovering the truth about what’s really happening, the protagonists attempt to escape. The Hollywood approach of The Island is in stark contrast to the contemplative nature of Never Let Me Go.

Never Let Me Go: My Verdict

Probably the best written alternative history novel ever. Hauntingly beautiful.

Never Let Me Go: The Movie

An adaptation of Never Let Me Go , staring Keira Knightley , Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, was released in 2010. It’s a good adaptation, sticking closely to the plot of the novel. It’s worth watching, but to me it’s nowhere near as good as the book.

Want to Read It?

The Never Let Me Go novel is available on UK Amazon here and US Amazon here .

The Never Let Me Go movie is available on UK Amazon here and US Amazon here .

Agree? Disagree?

If you’d like to discuss anything in my Never Let Me Go review, please email me. Otherwise, please feel free to share it using the buttons below.

20 Jul 2021
In Alternative History , Book Reviews
Alternative History Britain Movies Novels

← Previous Post

Biggest New Books
Non-Fiction
All Categories
First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

August 23, 2024

What is poetry?
Looking back at Bertolt Brecht
“ Hell hath no fury like a librarian scored ”

Member Login
Library Patron Login
Get a Free Issue of our Ezine! Claim

BookBrowse Reviews Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go

BookBrowse Review:
Critics' Consensus:
Readers' Rating:
First Published:
Apr 1, 2005, 320 pages
Mar 2006, 304 pages

Literary Fiction
Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
1960s & '70s
Dealing with Loss
Asian Authors
Philosophical
Physical & Mental Differences
Publication Information
Write a Review
Buy This Book

About This Book

Reading Guide
Media Reviews
Reader Reviews

'A Luminous Offering'. Novel

From the book jacket: As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. Comment: I was a little disappointed with Never Let Me Go - not because of the writing, which is as elegant as usual, but that Ishiguro raises many questions but answers few. Never Let Me Go is set in an alternative England in the 1990s with much of the action taking place as the narrator looks back on her childhood 20 years before. In this alternate England clones are bred for spare parts, but the people we meet don't seem to harbor any real anger for the system, and appear to, broadly speaking, accept their fate, and there is no indication that public opinion is anything other than totally accepting. Having said that, it's not Ishiguro's style to labor a point. Instead he slowly lets us into his characters' lives so we can see them as fully human, and by not letting us even glimpse the lives and minds of those ultimately in charge he heightens the ultimate inhumanity of their actions.

"Beyond the Book" articles
Free books to read and review (US only)
Find books by time period, setting & theme
Read-alike suggestions by book and author
Book club discussions
and much more!
Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
More about membership!

Beyond the Book

Read-alikes.

Genres & Themes

If you liked Never Let Me Go, try these:

Toward Eternity

by Anton Hur

Published 2024

About This book

Negotiating the terrain of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility , a brilliant, haunting speculative novel from a #1 New York Times bestselling translator that sets out to answer the question: What does it mean to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology?

The Other Valley

by Scott Alexander Howard

For fans of David Mitchell, Ruth Ozeki, and Kazuo Ishiguro, an elegant and exhilarating literary speculative novel about an isolated town neighbored by its own past and future, and a young girl who spots two elderly visitors from across the border: the grieving parents of the boy she loves.

Become a Member

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao

A love story set against India's political turmoil, where two young people defy social barriers.

Everything We Never Knew by Julianne Hough

A dazzling, heartwarming novel from Emmy winner Julianne Hough and Rule author Ellen Goodlett.

Solve this clue:

The A O M E

and be entered to win..

Win This Book

Follow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhail

A reimagining of the intrepid woman who braved treacherous waters on the first steamboat voyage to conquer the Mississippi River.

Your guide to exceptional books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Free Weekly Newsletters

Discover what's happening in the world of books: reviews, previews, interviews, giveaways, and more plus when you subscribe, we'll send you a free issue of our member's only ezine..

Spam Free : Your email is never shared with anyone; opt out any time.

The student news site of Moravian University

The Comenian

Book Review: “Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Sara Weidner , Community Section Editor | February 4, 2018

Photo via Google Images under Creative Commons License.

In his novel, “Never Let Me Go,” Kazuo Ishiguro offers an alternative historical timeline where the breakthrough of medical science has already occurred.

Science fiction novels sometimes miss the mark with capturing the attention of the general public due to their high-tech themes and scientific terminology, which can make it a somewhat intimidating genre.

Ishiguro successfully breaks this genre barrier by making “the other” portray human emotions and actions.

The main character, Kathy H., spends her days looking back instead of forward. The time spent with her teenage friends Tommy and Ruth at the English boarding school-like Hailsham seem a distant memory, bittersweet and poignant.

All the students at Hailsham have been told, and not told, who they are and what their overall purpose is.

They are clones who exist only to provide organ donations when necessary. They, along with all the other clones, known as “students,” live at Hailsham, an institution where they focus on their health and are encouraged to create art.

All students first become Carers, who take care of those in the process of giving donations before they become Donors themselves. By the end of the novel, they discover that the purpose of their art is to prove whether or not they have souls, thus justifying their humanity and right to humane treatment.

After their Hailsham days, the trio lives at The Cottages until they receive their notice to begin their Carer training. It is rumored that students at Hailsham are special in that they might be able to receive a deferral if a couple can prove they are truly in love. If accepted, they would be granted a few years together before starting their Carer training.

Kathy, now a Carer, travels the English countryside from recovery center to recovery center before she is unexpectedly reacquainted with her childhood friends. Once the three reunite, old memories emerge, bringing smiles and sentimental reminiscing. However, not all memories are pleasant and soon an old feud with Tommy at the core arises and creates tension between Ruth and Kathy.

In the end though, the three realize what truly matters most, and learn the solemn truth that dictates their lives.

By presenting the ethical issue of cloning in narrative fiction, the novel allows the topic to become more relatable to an audience that might not be familiar with the scientific and medical jargon surrounding cloning. “Never Let Me Go” is a clone narrative that forces readers to confront the ethical and moral implications of human cloning, what it truly means to be human, and tests the power of true love as never before.

The Inequality of the American Bail System

Economy be damned, i’m still living with my mom: the stigma of living with your parents.

There's no doubt we're living in financially tight times. Inflation is up, unemployment rates are getting worse … and there is still a stigma around...

Trump vs Biden: The Rerun No One Asked For

Praise of the Week: Catering Services

Interviews with libertarian presidential candidates.

I interviewed a variety of Libertarian presidential candidates for the upcoming 2024 election: Chase Oliver from Georgia, Jacob Hornberger from Virgin...

Hozier’s ‘Unheard:’ Too Short, Very Sweet

‘Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’ Review

‘Space Jam’ Review

Tierra Whack’s ‘WORLD WIDE WHACK’ (2024)

We’re All Queasy Over ‘Quiet on Set’

Comments (0).

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Supported by

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Sealed in a World That's Not as It Seems

Share full article

By Michiko Kakutani

April 4, 2005

'Never Let Me Go' By Kazuo Ishiguro 288 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

The teenagers in Kazuo Ishiguro's bravura new novel seem, at first meeting, like any other group of privileged boarding school students. They are constantly joining and abandoning rival cliques. They support and snipe at one another with petty rage and bantering good humor. They play sports, take art classes and obsess endlessly about sex. Their school, Hailsham, is a hermetic world unto itself -- a prettily groomed English Arcadia that boasts a cool sports pavilion, spacious playing fields, a picturesque pond and winding bucolic paths. Their teachers keep telling them that they are "special," that they have an important role to play in later life.

Hidden at the heart of Hailsham, however, is a horrible, dark secret -- a secret that the reader only gradually grasps.

As in so many of Mr. Ishiguro's novels, there is no conventional plot here. Instead, a narrator's elliptical reminiscences provide carefully orchestrated clues that the reader must slowly piece together, like a detective, to get a picture of what really happened and why.

Like the author's last novel ("When We Were Orphans"), "Never Let Me Go" is marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock's "Psycho." The remainder of the book, however, is a Gothic tour de force that showcases the same gifts that made Mr. Ishiguro's 1989 novel, "The Remains of the Day," such a cogent performance.

This time, Mr. Ishiguro's art of withholding -- his pared-down, Pintereque prose, his masterful narrative control, his virtuosic use of understatement and elision -- is put in the service of a far-out science fiction plot involving clones and organ transplants. The result, amazingly enough, is not the lurid thriller the subject matter might suggest. Rather, it's an oblique and elegiac meditation on mortality and lost innocence: a portrait of adolescence as that hinge moment in life when self-knowledge brings intimations of one's destiny, when the shedding of childhood dreams can lead to disillusionment, rebellion, newfound resolve or an ambivalent acceptance of a preordained fate.

The truth of what is going at Hailsham dawns on the reader slowly. At first, the only thing odd about the reminiscences of the narrator, Kathy, is her use of certain words: she tells us that she has worked as a "carer" for 11 years now, that her "donors" have "always tended to do much better than expected." We learn that Kathy was recently a carer for Ruth, one of her old friends from Hailsham, and that Ruth was staying at a "recovery center" in Dover.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

Want all of The Times? Subscribe .

Craft and Criticism
Fiction and Poetry
News and Culture
Lit Hub Radio
Reading Lists

Literary Criticism
Craft and Advice
In Conversation
On Translation
Short Story
From the Novel
Bookstores and Libraries
Film and TV
Art and Photography
Freeman’s
The Virtual Book Channel
Behind the Mic
Beyond the Page
The Cosmic Library
The Critic and Her Publics
Emergence Magazine
Fiction/Non/Fiction
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
The History of Literature
I’m a Writer But
Lit Century
Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
Write-minded
The Best of the Decade
Best Reviewed Books
BookMarks Daily Giveaway
The Daily Thrill
CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

Simple, Sparse and Profound: David Sexton on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

“what this book is about is ordinary, normal and everyday, the knowledge that we are mortal...”.

In 1990, even before starting The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro had been working on a project called “The Students’ Novel,” about “these strange young people living in the countryside, calling themselves students where there’s no university.” There was some kind of strange fate hanging over them, he recalled, that was related to nuclear weapons.

“I thought that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved around at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way,” resulting in a life span of thirty, rather than eighty, years, he told the Paris Review. He could not finish these stories, however. He took the project up again between The Unconsoled and his fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, published in 2000, but then again abandoned it.

Only around 2001 did the critical idea of dropping the nuclear element and turning instead to cloning come to him. “Around that time, in 2001, there was a lot of stuff about cloning, about stem-cell research, about Dolly the sheep. It was very much in the air,” Ishiguro says. One morning he heard a debate about biotechnology on the radio and seized upon the concept. “I could see a metaphor here. I was looking for a situation to talk about the whole aging process, but in such an odd way that we’d have to look at it all in a new way.” Actually, he added, the novel is hardly about the aging process and certainly not about old age but rather a way of explaining certain aspects of “what happens to you as you leave childhood, face up to adulthood, and then face up to your own mortality.”

And so Never Let Me Go came into being: the story of three friends who grow up in an enclosed environment, a kind of boarding school, only gradually coming to understand that, parentless and unable to have children themselves, they are not considered to be fully human like the people outside, destined for only very brief and restricted lives as adults, before they are required to fulfill the purpose for which they were created, donating their organs, until they die, or, as they call it, they “complete.”

Our realization of the truth about their situation is gradual. There is no startling reveal, no single shocking disclosure of where we are headed. Rather, just as the children themselves only slowly come to understand their fate, so do we as readers only piece together the implications gradually, as we do in life. In fact, the word “clone” appears for the first time only in Chapter 14, in Ruth’s tirade about the students being modeled on “trash,” long after the term will have occurred to the mind of every reader.

Ostensibly a work of science fiction, Never Let Me Go is really nothing of the kind. Ishiguro says he’s perfectly open to people reading it as a chilling warning about biotechnology but feels they’ve missed the inner heart of the book if they take it that way. He has certainly given readers nothing to foster such a misreading. For the book is set in the past, not the future: “England, late 1990s” it is specified before the novel begins.

The narrator, Kathy H, is thirty-one as the book opens, and has been a “carer” for nearly twelve years. She looks back to her time at a school she remains very proud to have attended, Hailsham, recalling first when she and her friends were children there, and then when they were teenagers, so locating it in the early and later Seventies, perhaps. Then in Part Two, she tells us about their lives afterwards, in “the Cottages” as young adults, perhaps in the early Eighties. But such dating is never precise and there are few contemporary references. There is almost no allusion to technology, beyond humdrum cars, Rovers and Volvos, and old-fashioned cassette tapes and Walkmans.

Almost nothing about the actual biological status of the clones is specified either—neither how they were created, nor how they can make their “donations” and continue for a while to live. Nor are we given any information about changes in society at large. Quite remarkably, there are simply no futuristic, alternative world or science-fiction components to the story. For what this book is about is ordinary, normal and everyday, the knowledge that we are mortal, that our time is limited, death inescapable.

And everything about the way in which it is written, from that absence of technology to the conversational, unremarkable language in which Kathy tells us her story, is calculated to bring it home to us that these are our own lives we are contemplating. In his invariably clear and modest way, Ishiguro describes this radical narrative thus: “The strategy here is that we’re looking at a very strange world, at a very strange group of people, and gradually, I wanted people to feel they’re not looking at such a strange world, that this is everybody’s story.”

As in all Ishiguro’s novels, he never explicitly states the conditions of life he is depicting but asks readers to realize what they are for themselves, to gather much not just from what is said but from what is not said as well. This internalizes the world of the novel for the reader in quite a different way from a more overt telling. His great admirer Hanya Yanagihara has spoken of his “remarkable way of using the white space —a lot of writers feel they have to say something all at once on the page, they’re maximalists and he’s not. He’s relying on the reader to understand what is happening off the page.”

lshiguro himself compares his ellipticality to that found in songs that contain many more hidden things than the average prose story. “You’re going to try to structure the unsaid things as finely and narrowly as you structure the said things. So you often leave out explicit meanings. You deliberately create spaces in the songs for the person listening to inhabit,” he told Alan Yentob in a 2021 Imagine TV profile. So it becomes your own story—rather as Kathy makes her own interpretation of the song “Never Let Me Go.”

It is telling that the very title, so poignant in itself, should be that of an imaginary song —a song asking for the impossible, like Bob Dylan’s great invocation of what we may not be, “Forever Young.” In that TV program, Ishiguro explained: “Never let me go is an impossible request. You can say, hold on to me for a long time, that’s reasonable. But never let me go—you know that what is being asked for, and asked for with great passion and need, is actually ultimately impossible to fulfill, so it’s that never that really appealed to me. It’s that huge human need just for a moment to deny the reality that we will all be parted.”

Many readers have testified to the fact that Never Let Me Go has a singular way of not just affecting them greatly in their conscious awareness but of becoming part of their unconscious and their own dream-life. One such, as it happens, was the actor Andrew Garfield, who played Tommy in the 2010 film of Never Let Me Go.

Interviewed, aged twenty-seven, together with Ishiguro, then fifty-six, just after the film had been made, Garfield admitted he hadn’t read the novel before being cast, but that it had affected him deeply when he did read it: “I read the script and the novel simultaneously and, gosh, it’s like you’ve been stabbed in the back from the first line, but you don’t realize it until the last 20 pages. It stays with you and upsets you. You wake up in the morning and you feel okay, then you remember Kazuo’s novel and you go, ‘Oh, God…'” On publication of Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro received a postcard from Harold Pinter, who had been involved in the initial development of the script of The Remains of the Day, saying, in his black felt-tip: “I found it bloody terrifying!”

I myself first read Never Let Me Go for review just prior to publication and remember being extremely upset by it. The immediate comparison for me was the shock of reading Pascal as an adolescent and I began the review simply by quoting the famous fragment from the Pensees: “ Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.”

As I said then, these few phrases, once read, cannot easily be forgotten, for they express a truth. To Pascal, it is not necessarily the whole truth, because this is man without God. But for those who are without God, it is a pitiless sentence. I finished the review saying the book was “like Pascal’s paragraph, no more and no less than an image of man’s life, painful to receive, hard to put away.” At the time I reported myself dismayed; I was in shock, it seems now to me. After reading the novel I had disturbing dreams in which I seemed to be in its world myself. However, I was in no doubt at all about the book’s stature and value.

As it happened, that year, 2005 , I had been invited to be a Man Booker judge, a little incongruously since, in my role then as Literary Editor at the London Evening Standard, rather than getting soundly behind all such trade promotions as I should have done, I had annually scoffed at its mishaps, mirthfully calling it a literary harvest festival and saying the judges were being asked to choose between an apple and orange and so forth. The Booker was then in its heyday of influence, not yet diffused by the decision to include American writers.

That year an astonishingly large number of good novels were published. Among those on the longlist that did not even make our shortlist were books by Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Dan Jacobson, and Rachel Cusk. Rejected at that meeting also, much to my surprise, were novels by Ian McEwan (Saturday) and J.M. Coetzee (Slow Man) that surely would have featured in any other year. The shortlist comprised John Banville (The Sea), Julian Barnes (Arthur & George), Sebastian Barry (A Long Long Way), Ali Smith (The Accidental ), Zadie Smith (On Beauty)— and Never Let Me Go.

I had long admired Ishiguro at this point. I had reviewed several of his novels and I had interviewed him relatively early in his career, shortly before An Artist of the Floating World was published, in February 1986, for the Literary Review. At the time I wrote there regularly, prized not only for my rare critical acumen but because, on taking office, the editor Auberon Waugh had promised the magazine’s readers that there would be SEX on every cover and my byline helped out with that rash pledge.

Nonetheless, the interview, in which I asked Ishiguro a great deal about his Japanese heritage, did not appear until January 1987, because it turned out that Bron Waugh, perhaps honoring his father’s prejudices, did not believe a Japanese author could possibly write English and was only persuaded otherwise after the novel had won praise and prizes.

Before the final Booker judging process began, I read Never Let Me Go for the second time, on a day-long ferry from St. Malo to Portsmouth, and was taken by it all the more, although reduced to tears. So, despite the strong competition, I felt sure that Ishiguro should and would win. But at the meeting to decide on the day of the prize there was deadlock. Lindsay Duguid, longtime fiction review editor at the TLS, backed Ishiguro too. But the forceful writer and bookseller Rick Gekoski strongly supported the Banville, and he was backed by the Irish novelist Josephine Hart. The discussion was protracted as long as possible that afternoon but ended with no resolution.

Finally we reconvened at a room in the Guildhall, shortly before the ceremony was to begin. The chair of the judges, until then not showing his hand, Professor John Sutherland, asked us whether, if he cast the deciding vote, we would all abide by it. We had got on well, time was up. We all said we would. Then Banville wins, he said. The next day Boyd Tonkin of the Independent wrote: “Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest.” I think he was right.

It can only have been a slight career hiccup to Ishiguro. He has always said he had “one of the easiest rides any author can have in recent English literary terms,” helped both by good reviews and by winning, or being shortlisted for, prizes with each book. “I’ve been fantastically lucky,” he has said. “Especially as I’ve made very few concessions to commercialism, so I couldn’t complain for one moment.” Never Let Me Go has now sold well over two million copies, been translated into many languages, and become a GCSE set text.

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 and in 2018 he was knighted for services to literature. Sir Kazuo holds Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, 2nd Class, Gold and Silver Star, too. Still, it was the wrong decision, one I felt abashed about having endorsed every time I saw somebody earnestly reading The Sea on the tube, on the bus, in the following months.

In a rapidly written article, Rick Gekoski (later, incidentally, in 2015, instrumental in selling Ishiguro’s literary archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas for $1m) defended our decision in the Times in a piece headed “At last, the best Booker book won.” Gekoski acknowledged John Banville’s The Sea had been pre-eminently his choice, calling it “one of the few submitted novels worth reading for the quality of the prose itself, which both demanded and repaid re-reading, spreading out in implication and richness the more one contemplated it.” He had read the book five times before the final meeting, he said, enjoying it more each time. It was “a complex, deeply textured book, with wonderful, sinuous and sensuous prose” in the high modernist tradition of Nabokov and Beckett.

One of the repeated criticisms of lshiguro’s work remains that the prose is plain and flat. Revisiting Never Let Me Go, Rachel Cusk termed it his “‘dead hand’ approach.” In a peculiarly dim review of Never Let Me Go in the London Review of Books, Frank Kermode recognized that the prose was appropriate to the character of Kathy but found the writing less engaging than in Ishiguro’s previous books: “Everything is expertly arranged, as it always is in Ishiguro, but this dear-diary prose surely reduces one’s interest.”

Ishiguro has himself pointed out how different his writing is from that of his more demonstrative contemporaries. “I can’t write those marvelous sentences, like Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, that crackle with vitality. I do get a great writerly kick out of reading writers at that sentence level, but I suppose I only respect novelists who have a powerful overall vision. I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.”

From so courteous a man, that’s quite a kick. “As a writer I think I’m almost the antithesis [of Rushdie],” he has even said. “The language I use tends to be the sort that actually suppresses meaning and tries to hide away meaning rather than chase after something just beyond the reach of words. I’m interested in the way words hide meaning.”

He owns that his relationship to the English language “has always been a slightly less secure one than would be the case for someone who was brought up entirely by English parents.” But if he does write a “careful, cautious English,” it is, he says, no bad thing perhaps, citing the example of Beckett, who chose to write in French because it disciplined him. “It is very easy for your own mastery of the language, your familiarity with the language to actually undermine your artistic intentions.”

At times, Ishiguro, a worker-hero of world book tours, has stated that he quite deliberately writes novels for international audiences and so has become hyper-conscious of what does not translate (he’s “haunted by the Norwegians,” he jokes). But he is selling himself short here. Having previously told one of his repeat interviewers, Bryan Appleyard, this, he told him recently, rather more suggestively: “The surface of my writing has to be simple, otherwise I become incomprehensible.”

In an encounter with the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, he explained: “There’s a surface quietness to my books… But for me, they’re not quiet books, because they’re books that deal with things that disturb me the most and questions that worry me the most. They’re anything but quiet to me.”

__________________________________

From David Sexton ’s introduction to Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Reprinted by permission of Everyman’s Library, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Introduction copyright © 2023 by David Sexton .

David Sexton

Previous article, next article.

RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Skip to main content
Skip to primary sidebar

The Paladin Pages

Rambly Reviews · Bookish Blogs · Misc. Musings

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ★ Book Review

August 13, 2021 by Tassara · Leave a Comment

Hi, friends! Thanks for joining me today; I’m so glad you’re here 💙. Today I’m sharing my review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel: Never Let Me Go . I didn’t really love this one, and I was hesitant to write a mostly negative review, but it ended up being an interesting case study, and I’m really proud of how this review turned out. So, let’s talk about it, shall we?

A quick note: I do get into some moderate spoilers in this review, but I’ll repeat what I said in my May 2021 Wrap-Up . I firmly believe this is the kind of book where spoilers may lend themselves to better expectations and a better reading experience. That said, if you want to remain completely unspoiled, you’ll want to skip the “Is Never Let Me Go Science-Fiction?” and ” What Moral Quandaries Does the Book Attempt to Address?” sections.

And now, on to the review!

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

Originally Published in 2005

Genre: Literary Fiction

Features: BIPOC Author

Support a local bookstore (and this blog!) by purchasing Never Let Me Go on Bookshop.org .

I read this book as part of my 2021 Reading Challenge. Check out all the books I’m reading for the challenge ･ﾟ✧here✧ﾟ･ .

Any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn’t possible there.

What is Never Let Me Go About?

Never Let Me Go is Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel that follows three friends during and after their time at Hailsham, a unique and secretive boarding school. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth have never known a world outside of Hailsham, but their lives inside are pretty complete. They take classes in the arts and sciences, play sports, and even have Sales and Exchanges.

Sales are one of the only opportunities for Hailsham students to get a glimpse of the outside world. Discarded and secondhand items are brought to Hailsham for students to pick from so they can make their dormitories feel more like home. Small comforts such as cute pencil cases and portable cassette players make their restrictive lives more endurable.

The Exchanges, though, are another thing altogether. These are seasonal art shows wherein Hailsham students present their original artwork for other students to purchase using tokens. The highest honor one can receive at an Exchange is to have their work taken away from school by Madame. The students believe that Madame has a gallery full of their artwork, though they can only imagine for what purpose.

Kathy and her cohorts may not know what to think of the outside world, but they can’t help but wonder what the outside world thinks of them…

We all sensed that to probe any further — about what [Madame] did with our work, whether there really was a gallery — would get us into territory we weren’t ready for yet.

Where Never Let Me Go Misses the Mark

Never Let Me Go has a lot of fascinating ideas and a few moments of brilliant writing. Unfortunately, it fails to truly succeed at any one thing. Some books (and series) can be described with the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Never Let Me Go is a book full of clever but disparate parts that create an incoherent whole.

The world-building wavers between inconsistent and nonexistent. The main characters are one-dimensional and difficult to invest in. The writing’s few shining moments are overshadowed by manipulative narrative choices. This creates a sense of uneven, distracted pacing, which, in turn, only serves to make the entire story feel unfocused.

Intangible, general impressions of a book, such as its pacing and broader story elements, can be challenging to quantify in a written review. Even still, the characterization, narrative style, writing choices, and themes give us plenty to discuss.

So, let’s unpack that.

Inconsistent main characters

Guiding us along this zig-zagging journey through memory is our narrator, Kathy. Given that this is her story, one can only assume that Kathy is supposed to be, you know, likable. Unfortunately, that turns out to be quite the task. She first introduces herself in a statement that assumes the reader, who knows nothing about her or her world, must be jealous of her cushy life.

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years… I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when to just shrug and tell them to snap out of it… I can understand how you might get resentful — about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student — which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.

Kathy then spends the rest of the book alternating between a passive observer in her own story and an active participant in highly questionable behavior. One of Kathy’s best friends is Tommy, a boy she befriends at Hailsham after standing up for him against some relentless bullies. Her other best friend is Ruth, a vindictive girl whom Kathy allows to bully Tommy. Apparently, Kathy only has a backbone when it services the plot.

Ruth is not a good person. She starts dating Tommy to prevent him from getting between her and Kathy; she’s mean-spirited and she keeps secrets from her friends to hold them over their heads. Still, Ruth has one of the most intriguing plot points in the book when she tries to find her “possible.” (Put a pin in that 📌.) Ruth is not easy to like. But she’s not supposed to be. So, in a way, Ruth is probably the most successfully written character in the book. It’s just a shame she’s designed to be insufferable for most of the story.

How retrospective storytelling hurts Never Let Me Go

Firstly, the detached, retrospective narrative style hurts the book because it keeps the reader at arm’s length from the story and its narrator. Kathy is, and always has been, resigned to her fate. (Put a pin in that, too 📌.) She does not invite the reader to share her experiences. She merely recounts events from her life, shrugs, and says, “do with that what you will.”

In a book that is supposed to focus on its characters, an emotionally unavailable narrator is a nearly insurmountable obstacle on the course toward emotional investment in a story.

Another way this narrative style hurts the book is that it removes any real tension between our characters. Kathy reveals that she reconnected with Ruth during her time as a carer and alludes to her experiences with Tommy when it was his turn to become a donor. So, any time the three of them appear on the brink of irreversible fallout, we know it won’t be forever. We know they’ll eventually get to patch things up in the end.

Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose… the instant I saw her again, at that recovery center in Dover, all our differences — while they didn’t exactly vanish — seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did.

Non-chronological and non-traditional narrative styles can work. However, if not done well, this style can quickly become a gimmick — and a crutch. The author gives themselves license to randomly insert plot twist-type reveals without doing any legwork to earn those reveals earlier in the story. The book may not have actually been as clever as it tried to be in this regard. Still, manipulative storytelling isn’t less manipulative just because it’s done poorly.

Is Never Let Me Go science-fiction?

So, the short answer to this question is: no, this book is not science-fiction. The long answer is: kind of, but still not really. Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate present where society has perfected and implemented human cloning for the purposes of organ harvesting. Sounds interesting, right? Well, Kazuo Ishiguro doesn’t think so.

He does not explore the world that created or coexists with a society of clones bred for the express purpose of having them one day “willingly” “donate” their organs. That lack of exploration might have been acceptable if Ishiguro was consistent about it. Instead, he info-dumps a bunch of retroactive exposition in chapter twenty-two of a book that’s only twenty-three chapters long.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls… we did it to prove you had souls at all… Most importantly, we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being. Before that, all clones — or students, as we preferred to call you — existed only to supply medical science. In the early days, after the war, that’s largely all you were to most people. Shadowy objects in test tubes.

This exposition comes when Kathy and Tommy are trying to cash in on an opportunity to delay their organ donations (put a pin in that, too 📌), but it changes nothing. Information that should have altered the way Tommy and Kathy looked at their entire childhoods gets a shrug and a resounding “well, darn.”

What moral quandaries does the book attempt to address?

The short answer to that question is: none. The long answer is: well, still none, but the book does a lot of mental gymnastics to make the reader think it’s addressing something .

Remember all those pins we stuck into this review in previous sections? Time to break out the bulletin board because Kazuo Ishiguro wants to teach us a lesson.

📌 #1: The Possibles Are Endless

The first moral quandary Never Let Me Go fails to address is that of the power of indoctrination. None of the characters in the book ever question the apparent inevitability of their fates. This might be understandable and a relevant theme to explore if Ishiguro chose to keep the characters in their ideological echo chambers for the entirety of the story. But he doesn’t do that.

The first pin we stuck into this conversation was on the topic of Ruth trying to discover her “possible.” A “possible” is the person whom a clone thinks may be the source of their DNA. Ruth attempts to locate her possible after she leaves Hailsham and before her time as a carer. Stalking her doppelganger through town shows the group how much like “regular” people they are. Though none of them seem interested in why, if they are so much like “normal” humans, they can’t also live a normal life.

Hailsham was unique in many ways. However, it was not unique in allowing its students the chance to taste normalcy for a few years after “graduating.” Thus, the bubble of indoctrination bursts. If the students never got that taste of normalcy, it would be easier to buy that they never attempt to obtain liberation from their fates. But that’s not the case. The book fails to prove that indoctrination works. Instead, it demonstrates that its characters have a passing curiosity about the world around them but no interest in actively engaging with it.

📌 #2: We Live in a Society

The second predicament Never Let Me Go attempts to address is how society determines which lives are sacred. In this world, society now cares so much about the right to life that they can avoid relying on using the organs of the recently deceased to provide life-saving transplants. They do this by breeding other, different humans and killing them slowly and prematurely for this express purpose.

Once again, this might have been an interesting theme to explore if Ishiguro had been consistent about it. Instead, he has the teachers from Hailsham school conduct an experiment to prove that cloned humans do, in fact, have souls and feelings. They can, in fact, experience the joys of an actual, meaningful, human existence. But, alas, the experiment failed, and the fates of the Hailsham students remained unchanged.

There are people out there… who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you… The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

C’est la vie; we tried; we believe you have souls, says the book, but it’s not us you have to convince. It’s the others, that nameless, faceless society that doesn’t think you have souls. Thus, we will do nothing to help you escape your brutal fates.

That’s gonna be a yikes from me, dawg.

That’s just one idea, though. There is, potentially, another way to interpret the book’s message here.

📌 #3: Delays Have Dangerous Ends

(There’s a Shakespeare reference for all my theatre kids in the audience.) The last moral dilemma Never Let Me Go fails to address is the whole clones’ rights situation. The final pin we stuck into this conversation was on the topic of Kathy and Tommy’s attempt to delay their donations. To be clear, they are not trying to avoid their fates altogether. They simply want to wait a few years before dying a slow and painful death to save other peoples’ lives.

They track down some old Hailsham folks to find out if the whispers about deferrals are true. Unfortunately, they learn, those whispers were only rumors. Upon hearing this, they make no attempt to challenge this assertion or stand up for what they might reasonably perceive as an injustice against them. They simply shrug and say, “we tried,” before returning to business as usual.

Tommy and Kathy want to live badly enough to pursue a rumor about deferring their donations, but not enough to take their situations into their own hands and do something to avoid their inevitable fates. That could have been an excellent opportunity to analyze the power of groupthink and indoctrination, but, well… see above.

Ultimately, each of these pins boils down to the following questions: does Never Let Me Go have a bad take? That is: does the book want us to think clones are not real humans; therefore, we shouldn’t pity Tommy and Kathy’s inability to defer their donations? Or, does this book want us to emotionally invest in characters who aren’t very much invested in themselves? Either way, it’s… looking rough.

Why Never Let Me Go Might Still Be for You

Whew, that was a long list of complaints, I know. If you’re still here… bless you. I’m not mad at Never Let Me Go ; I’m just… disappointed. I don’t want it to seem like I thought this book was horrible, though. So, I’d like to finish this review by calling out a few of the book’s redeeming qualities.

Firstly, Kazuo Ishiguro is undoubtedly a talented writer. Despite my issues with the narrative choices, there are still moments where his writing shines through. Sometimes this happens in moments with very layered character interactions. Sometimes, as in my favorite passage in the book (below), he creates a scene with breathtaking imagery.

Secondly, as I’ve been saying since my May 2021 Wrap-Up, the book isn’t really about the plot. Even if you read this entire review, spoiler sections and all, you could still really like this book if you tend to like introspective, stream-of-consciousness narratives in general. Read a few chapters and, if you find yourself connecting to Kathy, you’ll most likely enjoy this book a lot more than I did. Especially since you won’t be expecting the sci-fi elements to go anywhere.

The woods were at the top of the hill that rose behind Hailsham House. All we could see really was a dark fringe of trees, but I certainly wasn’t the only one of my age to feel their presence day and night. When it got bad, it was like they cast a shadow over the whole of Hailsham; all you had to do was turn your head or move towards a window and there they’d be, looming in the distance. Safest was in front of the main house, because you couldn’t see them from any of the windows. Even so, you never really got away from them.

Letting Go of Never Let Me Go

Wow, we made it, folks. We’ve arrived at the conclusion. Have you read Never Let Me Go or anything else by Kazuo Ishiguro? If so, what did you think?

If you made it to the end of this review, I really want to thank you for sticking around and hearing me out. I hope my “this would have been interesting, but…” statements clarified why this book missed the mark for me, but didn’t discourage you from picking this up if its premise interests you!

Personally, even though I was disappointed by Never Let Me Go , I still plan to read Ishiguro’s 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day . I’m also a huge film fan, and seeing that its adaptation received so many Academy Award nominations has me intrigued on several levels.

I’ll be back soon with another blog post, so keep your eyes peeled for that! In the meantime, you can keep up with my reading on Goodreads , where you can find me at @tassara_txt, or follow my other social media: I’m on Instagram as @thepaladinpages, Twitter as @tassara_exe, and Pinterest as @tassara_jpg.

As always: thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon. 💙

You can also read my reviews on Goodreads. Check this one out ･ﾟ✧here✧ﾟ･ .

The Bookshop.org links in this post are affiliate links. Bookshop.org allows you to buy books online while supporting an independent bookstore of your choosing. You are not obligated to purchase through these links. However, doing so helps support this blog at no additional cost to you. Sharing and following are great free ways to show your support and are equally appreciated!

About Tassara

Hi there, I'm Tassara! 👋🏽 I like to read, I like to write, and sometimes I write about the things I read. If you like books, we'll probably be friends.

Reader Interactions

Share your thoughts below cancel reply.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Discover more from The Paladin Pages

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Book Review — Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rating — 4/5.

Cariad Jones

This is unlike any other science fiction that I have read before.

Usually, in sci-fi dystopias, the world is incredibly dark and miserable. Books like ‘Handmaids Tale’ and ‘Nineteen-eighty-four’ paint an intricate and terrifying picture. The technology is flashy and scary, and society is visibly troubled and impacts all citizens. Never Let Me Go, isn’t like this, which both intrigued and frustrated me.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of three childhood friends, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, who grew up in the mysterious and secluded boarding school of Hailsham. The narrative slowly reveals the strange parallel world that the characters live in. In this world, humans are cloned, trained to become carers of other cloned organ donors, and ultimately have their own organs harvested in early adulthood. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are all clones.

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy’s childhood is incredibly idyllic. They live in a rural wonderland, in a school full of gentle and supportive teachers, who encourage the importance of creativity and art. Then, when they go into the real world, everything seems so incredibly ordinary. Ordinary cars, office jobs, shops, pop music, all very mundane. The only difference really is that cancer is as curable as a chest infection, thanks to these donors. It’s only really a dystopia for the clones, who have no say in their tragic destiny.

Because I’m so used to the world-building of dystopian fiction, I was left wanting to know more about the world of Never Let Me Go. I wanted to learn more about how this type of bio-medical science became the norm. I wanted to meet characters who were openly critical of it. I wanted to hear about protests, I wanted to hear snippets of news talking about human rights violations. I didn’t get any of that. All I got was an explanation about how society didn’t really want to know about how cancer became so curable, they didn’t want to face the humanity of their walking, talking, feeling bags of organs.

I’m sure that withholding so much information from the reader was intentional, and it made me think about how I engage with the characters of dystopian fiction. Instead of asking questions like ‘Does Tommy Love Kathy or Ruth?’ or ‘Why is Tommy so insecure?’ I’m thinking, ‘What organs does Tommy have left?’ and ‘are there any fugitive donors?’ The main plot of this story isn’t the fact that they’re sub-humans that are vital to society, like Margaret Atwood’s Handmaids, but it’s about their relationships with one another.

Because of my already pre-conceived notions of how dystopian fiction works, I had already de-humanized them as a reader and just wanted to know all the external bollocks. While I found it frustrating to read and not get the answers I want. It said a lot about how I engage with oppressed characters in dystopian fiction.

This is the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro that I have read, and though he pissed me off by not giving me all the gory, unethical details that I wanted, he’s got me hooked on his writing style.

Written by Cariad Jones

Near hopeless unknown aspiring novelist

Text to speech

ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

Book to Screen

Ishiguro's 'A Pale View of Hills' To Become Film

BY Michael Schaub • yesterday

Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills is headed to the big screen, Deadline reports .

Ishiguro’s first novel, published in 1982, follows Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in the U.K., reeling from the suicide of her daughter, and thinking back to her life in post-World War II Nagasaki. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “evocative but oppressively unfocused fiction.”

The film is being developed by the production companies Bunbuku and Number 9 Films. Kei Ishikawa ( A Man ) will write and direct, with Ishiguro on board as an executive producer, and Suzu Hirose ( A Morning of Farewell ) set to star.

Ishiguro’s novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go , have previously been adapted into films, and two of his other novels, The Buried Giant and Klara and the Sun , are both in the works as movies.

Ishiguro told Deadline that he is “a great admirer” of director Ishikawa.

“He has a masterly command over the language of cinema and draws superbly nuanced performances from his actors,” he said. “His fine screenplay, which I’ve read with fascination, is mysterious and moving. The story itself concerns the yearnings, hopes and fears of the generation that emerged in a rapidly changing Japan after the horrors of World War II and the atomic bombings. How appropriate, then, that our movie will be released as we mark the 80th anniversary of the end of those terrible events whose shadows continue to fall over us all today.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.

YA Book From Mikki Daughtry Coming in 2025

Seen & Heard YA Book From Mikki Daughtry Coming in 2025

'Say Nothing' FX Adaptation To Premiere Nov. 14

Book to Screen 'Say Nothing' FX Adaptation To Premiere Nov. 14

Profiles Fall Preview 2024: Kao Kalia Yang

‘The Supremes at Earl’s’: Giving Up the Ghost

Book to Screen ‘The Supremes at Earl’s’: Giving Up the Ghost

Our Take On This Week's Bestsellers

Our Verdict

More Book to Screen

Millie Bobby Brown Developing Novel for Netflix

Featured Interviews

podcast Episode 386: Chris La Tray

podcast Episode 385: Caro De Robertis

Episode 384: Best August Books With Abi Daré

podcast Episode 384: Best August Books With Abi Daré

podcast Episode 383: Kyle Lukoff

podcast Episode 382: J. Courtney Sullivan

The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews

Featuring 332 industry-first reviews of fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and YA books; also in this issue: our annual Fall Preview, with a first look at the season’s most anticipated titles, author interviews, and much more

The Kirkus Star

One of the most coveted designations in the book industry, the Kirkus Star marks books of exceptional merit.

The Kirkus Prize

The Kirkus Prize is among the richest literary awards in America, awarding $50,000 in three categories annually.

Great Books & News Curated For You

Be the first to read books news and see reviews, news and features in Kirkus Reviews . Get awesome content delivered to your inbox every week.

Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro BOOK REVIEW

Post published: May 25, 2022
Post category: Quick Reviews

Publication Date: April, 5th 2005

Publisher : Faber and Faber

ISBN : 9780571224135

Genre : Science Fiction

Strong Point : The atmosphere of surrealism and creepiness during the whole book.

Weak Point : The story somehow didn’t reach me completely. I felt for the characters but I simply could not understand many of his behaviors.

Goodreads Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3.84/5)

Read book blurb here

“What made the tape so special for me was this one particular song: track number three “Never Let Me Go.”

“NEVER LET ME GO”

I like Ishiguro. “The Remains of the Days” is an excellent book so I wanted to read another of his works.

I found “Never Let Me Go” in my local bookshop and I decided to give it a try.

At the beginning of the book I was startled by how different the style this book felt in comparison with “The Remains” but, of course, between the two books there is a gap of 17 years so the difference in style is normal.

I liked the book as a whole but it is not a five stars book for me. Let’s get to it, shall we?

We find the protagonist in England in the late 1990s. Her name is Kathy H. and she is 31 years old.

We are told that Kathy has been a “carer” for almost 12 years now. And we think, ok, she is like a nurse, or works at an old folks’ home or something similar. But no…that is not the case.

Furthermore, we learn that apart from the “carers” there are also “guardians” and “donors”; of what, we do not know. We also learn that after the third or fourth “donation” people are “completed”. Weird, right? That is why “Never Let Me Go” is considered a dystopia.

We go back in time and Ishiguro tells us about Kathy’s past in a kind of boarding school called Hailsham, and about her life there with her friends, especially with Tommy and Ruth.

We start to sense that something weird and creepy is happening at the place: there are peculiar people like “Madame”, Miss Lucy, etc.

In addition, the children grow up thinking they are special. They do not have parents, nor they can have children in the future. And yet, they spend their days at that enclosed school because they are different from the rest of the people.

However, the author lets us thinking about what is going on there for, I think, too long. He doesn’t clearly explain what is happening with all the characters for a very long time.

PHILOSOPHICAL AS WELL AS SCARY

Ishiguro brings up very interesting topics in this book. I don’t want to give too many details because then I would spoil it for you.

However, in “Never Let Me Go” one can find topics like discrimination, the thin line between science and its use for the benefit of one part of society and detrimental to the other.

Are we just us as long as we have a purpose in life? Are we just what society expects us to be? And if we rebel against this “expectation”, are we good people or just a failure?

Furthermore, it is also quite scary because in my opinion, we are very close to experiencing what it is narrated in the book. And I think most of us would be ok with it.

FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT “NEVER LET ME GO”

I must say I enjoyed the story. I like dystopian books and this one touches all the bases. The topic is very interesting and raises a lot of moral dilemmas and it is open for very fascinating discussions.

I really felt for the characters. I felt very sorry for them. It must be very hard not to be able to escape a life that you have not chosen, but someone else had done it for you, even before you were born.

They felt trapped in a world, a parallel universe, which treats them as “things” which can be used and thrown away, and they cannot do anything to change it. But yet, aren’t we all also only objects for society?

The whole book is full of pessimism and the atmosphere is heavy and full of darkness. This darkness goes a bit away when the characters are young and spend their days studying and playing, oblivious of what awaits them outside the walls of the boarding school.

For all this, only if you like science-fiction / dystopian books, I really recommend this book.

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick BOOK REVIEW

“Why She Wrote” by Lauren Burke & Hannah K. Chapman BOOK REVIEW

“The Pocket Wife” by Susan Crawford BOOK REVIEW

TN Navbharat
Times Drive
Shopping Guide
Health and Me
ET Now Swadesh

Kazuo Ishiguro: How Songwriting Shapes the Stories of a Nobel Laureate

Updated Aug 20, 2024, 23:00 IST

Kazuo Ishiguro: How Songwriting Shapes the Stories of a Nobel Laureate (Picture Credit - The Talks)

The Connection Between Music and Writing

Thematic parallels: love, memory, and loss, the influence of song structure on narrative form, the harmony of music and literature.

Sonakshi Sinha Celebrates 2 Months Of Marital Bliss. Jokes 'Only A Lifetime More Of You Annoying Me'

Amazon India Announces Upto 12% Reduction in Selling Fees Ahead of Festive Season

Ganesh Chaturthi Celebrations Have A New Address For Travellers: Goa

Key Rules To Identify Fake And Authentic Chanel Handbags

Guess THIS Bigg Boss OTT 3 Contestant Who Was Once Taken Off-Air Abruptly As He Appeared DRUNK

SSINGH30: Olympic Winner Sarabjot Singh Reveals Reason Behind Hidden Message On Pistol

WazirX Allows Partial INR Withdrawals Post $230 Million Cyberattack, Plans Restructuring Via Singapore Court

Doctors Perform India's First Scar Ectopic Pregnancy Via Robotic Surgery

A dedicated bibliophile with a love for psychology and mythology, I am the author of two captivating novels. I craft stories that delve into the intri... View More

Dr Blossom Kochhar Launches Her New Book 'The Glow Getter's Guide To Everyday Skincare', Unveils Her Beauty Secrets

12 Classic Books That Offer a Window into History and Humanity

Janmashtami 2024: Know The Secret Behind The Usage Of Cucumber During The Festival

Priyanka Chopra's Magenta Saree Gets Sultry 'Desi Girl' Spice Through Strappy Blouse At Brother's Wedding Festivities

Sikiya Kheer: Madhya Pradesh’s Famous Wild Millet Kheer From The Tribal Menu

Search form

Jiayang fan teaches remains of the day and never let me go by kazuo ishiguro.

Jiayang Fan is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she has worked since 2010. She is at work on her first book, Motherland , to be published by FSG.

(Ticket price includes the copy of the book and priority shipping)

Klara and the Sun: A Novel

About this audiobook, ratings and reviews, about the author, rate this audiobook, listening information, listeners also liked.

More by Kazuo Ishiguro

Similar audiobooks

IMAGES

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, First Edition
Book Review: “Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro
reading: Book Review : "Never Let Me Go", by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Book review of Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

COMMENTS

'Never Let Me Go': When They Were Orphans
April 17, 2005. NEVER LET ME GO By Kazuo Ishiguro. 288 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24. There is no way around revealing the premise of Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel. It is brutal, especially for a writer ...
NEVER LET ME GO
That you were less than human, so it didn't matter.". That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill's superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood's celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power. A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Let me start by saying that my review might contain some plot spoilers. However I personally don't think that knowing the plot in advance will in any way diminish the enjoyment of this story. ... (Book 1 From 1001 books) - Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go, is a 2005 dystopian science fiction novel, by Nobel Prize-winning British ...
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" is a quiet masterpiece that will burrow under your skin and stay there long after the final page. On its surface, it presents as a melancholic coming-of-age tale following a trio of friends—Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy—as they progress from idyllic school days at the eerily insular Hailsham boarding academy into the harsh awakenings of adulthood.
Never Let Me Go Book Review
As he famously proved in his Man Booker Award-winning novel Remains of the Day (1989), Ishiguro is a master of restraint; he holds back just enough to create emotional tension, so even his least eventful plots become page-turners. Though Never Let Me Go is not a masterpiece on the order of Remains, it is thought-provoking and creates a fully ...
Never Let Me Go Review: Ishiguro's Commentary on Cloning
Book Title: Never Let Me Go. Book Description: 'Never Let Me Go' challenges readers to comprehend a world in which cloning is legal and utilized for the sole purpose of creating a source of viable organs. Book Author: Kazuo Ishiguro. Book Edition: First Edition. Book Format: Hardcover. Publisher - Organization: Knopf. Date published: September ...
Never Let Me Go (novel)
Never Let Me Go is a 2005 science fiction novel by the British author Kazuo Ishiguro.It was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize (an award Ishiguro had previously won in 1989 for The Remains of the Day), for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award and for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005 and included the novel in its "100 Best English ...
Review: Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro
Review: Never Let Me Go. By Kazuo Ishiguro. This dystopian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is a complex and deeply compassionate insight into friendship and humanity. The narrative follows the life of Kathy from her childhood in Hailsham (an idyllic institution for raising children) to her work as a carer as an adult.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
FABER & FABER £16.99 (263pp) £15.99 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897. Kazuo Ishiguro is a master storyteller, in a class of his own making. In this, his sixth and strangest novel, his narrative ...
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Summary and reviews
Book Summary. A tale of deceptive simplicity that slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance - and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work. From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly re-imagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship ...
Book Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Gois another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day. TL;DR Review. Never Let Me Gois a quietly eerie, thought-provoking book with a strong first-person narrator. It's engaging and will stick with you long after you finish it. For you if: You like books that ask ethical questions.
Okay, NYT Got It Right With This Best of the 21st Century Book Pick
It's this book right here. But… if you're looking for a book that won't make you cry uncontrollably, maybe set this book down. I've read this one many times, and it always leaves me in tears. Never Let Me Go follows Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, three friends and students at Hailsham Academy, an elite English boarding school. Students of ...
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Futuristic Reality. Never Let Me Go is one of the best novels I've read in recent years. It's about much more than a dystopian future - it's about the predictability of death, along with the evils in everyday life. With the trivial persistence's and the crushing defeats, the theme of malevolent runs deep.
Never Let Me Go: Book Review, synopsis and analysis
Never let Me Go is not an alternative history novel in the way most of the novels I review are. There's no specifically stated point of departure, but it would seem that in the 1950s scientists perfected human cloning and the public waved away ethical concerns. In the 1970s, the small group that ran Hailsham tried to raise the ethical issues ...
All Book Marks reviews for Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Unfortunately, Never Let Me Go includes a carefully staged revelation scene, in which everything is, somewhat portentously, explained. It's a little Hollywood, and the elucidation is purchased at too high a price. The scene pushes the novel over into science fiction, and this is not, at heart, where it seems to want to be.
Review of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Comment: I was a little disappointed with Never Let Me Go - not because of the writing, which is as elegant as usual, but that Ishiguro raises many questions but answers few. Never Let Me Go is set in an alternative England in the 1990s with much of the action taking place as the narrator looks back on her childhood 20 years before. In this ...
"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro : r/books
Suzann7777. MOD. "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. Magic is when you're reading one thing, but something much deeper is going into your head. Reading Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO, I was first caught up in the story details, the intimate memories of the main character, Kathy, and the vivid pictures Kathy paints of her childhood, her ...
Book Review: "Never Let Me Go," by Kazuo Ishiguro
Reviews. In his novel, "Never Let Me Go," Kazuo Ishiguro offers an alternative historical timeline where the breakthrough of medical science has already occurred. Science fiction novels sometimes miss the mark with capturing the attention of the general public due to their high-tech themes and scientific terminology, which can make it a ...
Sealed in a World That's Not as It Seems
'Never Let Me Go' By Kazuo Ishiguro 288 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24. The teenagers in Kazuo Ishiguro's bravura new novel seem, at first meeting, like any other group of privileged boarding school ...
Simple, Sparse and Profound: David Sexton on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let
In a peculiarly dim review of Never Let Me Go in the London Review of Books, Frank Kermode recognized that the prose was appropriate to the character of Kathy but found the writing less engaging than in Ishiguro's previous books: "Everything is expertly arranged, as it always is in Ishiguro, but this dear-diary prose surely reduces one's ...
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ★ Book Review
Never Let Me Go is Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel that follows three friends during and after their time at Hailsham, a unique and secretive boarding school. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth have never known a world outside of Hailsham, but their lives inside are pretty complete. They take classes in the arts and sciences, play sports, and even have Sales ...
My review of 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro : r/Indianbooks
Just completed 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro. It gives me the ick to use the word 'completed' after reading the book. It was a page-turner. The language was simple yet moving, focusing more on showing rather than telling, which is always the mark of a great book. The emotions I felt while flipping through the pages were numbingly intense.
Book Review
Never Let Me Go, isn't like this, which both intrigued and frustrated me. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of three childhood friends, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, who grew up in the mysterious and secluded boarding school of Hailsham. The narrative slowly reveals the strange parallel world that the characters live in.
Ishiguro's 'A Pale View of Hills' To Become Film
Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills is headed to the big screen, Deadline reports.. Ishiguro's first novel, published in 1982, follows Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in the U.K., reeling from the suicide of her daughter, and thinking back to her life in post-World War II Nagasaki.
"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro BOOK REVIEW
"Never Let Me Go" - I like Ishiguro. "The Remains of the Days" is an excellent book so I wanted to read another of his works. ... "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro BOOK REVIEW. Post published: May 25, 2022; Post category: Quick Reviews; Publication Date: April, 5th 2005. Publisher: Faber and Faber. ISBN: 9780571224135. Genre: Science ...
Kazuo Ishiguro: How Songwriting Shapes the Stories of a Nobel Laureate
Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author known for his evocative prose and deeply introspective narratives, has a lesser-known passion that has significantly influenced his writing: songwriting.While many readers are familiar with his acclaimed novels like 'The Remains of the Day' and 'Never Let Me Go', fewer are aware of how his involvement in music, particularly songwriting, has shaped ...
Jiayang Fan teaches Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo
Jiayang Fan teaches Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro . Six meetings Tuesdays at 7PM EST via Zoom September 10th-October 15th. ... She is at work on her first book, Motherland, to be published by FSG. (Ticket price includes the copy of the book and priority shipping) SKU: 9781400078776seminartues.
Klara and the Sun: A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun: A Novel audiobook written by Kazuo Ishiguro. Narrated by Sura Siu. Get instant access to all your favorite books. No monthly commitment. Listen online or offline with Android, iOS, web, Chromecast, and Google Assistant. Try Google Play Audiobooks today!

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Main Character Analysis:

Writing Style:

What People Are Saying:

My Personal Take:

Wrapping It Up:

More on this topic

Readers also enjoyed

Book Reviews

Author Interviews

Social Media Promotion

Social Media Set up

Website Creation

Google / Facebook / Youtube Adverts

For more details mail us at [email protected]

Quick Links

Recent Posts

Or browse by category:

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Common Sense Selections for Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Common Sense Media Review

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 13+?

Any Positive Content?

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Products & Purchases

Violence & Scariness

Positive Role Models

Positive Messages

Educational Value

Where to Read

Fascinating social sci-fi

Is It Any Good?

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Book Details

Did we miss something on diversity?

Suggest an Update

Wither: The Chemical Garden Trilogy, Book 1

The Knife of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking, Book 1

The Adoration of Jenna Fox: The Jenna Fox Chronicles, Book 1

Never Let Me Go

Character Analysis

Ishiguro’s Style and Writing Techniques

Philosophical Content

Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro's Commentary on Cloning

Join or Create Groups

About Emma Baldwin

Block Member?

Review: Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

US Edition Change

Thank you for registering

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Support truly independent journalism

Join our commenting forum

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Aug 31 Never Let Me Go

Cover Description

TL;DR Review

Full Review

Content and Trigger Warnings

Sep 10 The Spear Cuts Through Water

Aug 29 Book Lovers

Okay, NYT Got It Right With This Best of the 21st Century Book Pick