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Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Summary

The narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel is a woman named Kathy H., a graduate of an experimental English boarding school called Hailsham who, many years later, becomes curious about the true nature of the place. Along with Tommy, one of her two best friends from those days, Kathy does some research into Hailsham. What she finds is a stunning revelation about herself and her fellow graduates, and raises questions about cloning, genetic experimentation, and their consequences. Ishiguro's first science-fiction novel, NEVER LET ME GO examines a philosophy that is intrinsically antihuman even as it probes deeply into its characters' touching and vulnerable humanity.

Customer Reviews

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Media Reviews

"[D]isturbingly eloquent....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. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy."

   -- Kirkus

"Done with great delicacy and panache...."    -- D.J. Taylor

   -- Literary Review

"Kathy tells her story in (the novel says) 'England, late 1990s,' so the book seems to belong to the same genre as Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, counterfactual historical fiction....The strangeness...is ingeniously evoked-by means of literal-minded accounts of things that don't quite add up-and teasing out the hidden story is the main pleasure of the book."    -- Louis Menand

   -- New Yorker

"NEVER LET ME GO is like [THE REMAINS OF THE DAY] insofar as it's about the way people will accept their lot in life even though it may be self-destructive....What begins as a mystery with futuristic undertones ends up an engrossing meditation on the here and now. As always, Ishiguro pulls you under, even as you convince yourself that you're just going wading."    -- Jeff Giles

   -- Newsweek

"NEVER LET ME GO is unlikely to be everybody's cup of tea. The people in it aren't heroic. The ending is not comforting. Nevertheless, this is a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a glass, darkly."    -- Margaret Atwood

   -- Slate

"The setup is so shocking-in such a potentially dime-store-novel way-that it's hard to believe at first that it issued from Ishiguro's desktop. Has one of our subtlest observers gone to pulp? The novel is the starkest instance yet of the paradox that has run through all Ishiguro's work. Here is a writer who takes enormous gambles, then uses his superior gifts to manage the risk as tightly as possible....[I]f the novel feels a bit too distant to move us to outright heartbreak, it delivers images of odd beauty and a mounting existential distress that hangs around long after we've read it."    -- Sarah Kerr

   -- New York Times Book Review

"...Ishiguro serves up the saddest, most persuasive science fiction you'll read. Set in 'England, late 1990s,' the novel posits a technological breakthrough whose effect is to condemn the children of Hailsham to a fate that was, until this novel, unthinkable. Ishiguro's imagining of the children's misshapen little world is profoundly thoughtful, and their hesitant progression into knowledge of their plight is an extreme and heartbreaking version of the exodus of all children from the innocent in which the benevolent but fraudulent adult world conspires to place them."

   -- Atlantic Monthly

"If Ishiguro is a writer of uncommon restraint, he is also a writer who has increasingly made demands of his readers. Despite Kathy's easy and engaging narrative voice, this is true, too, of NEVER LET ME GO: A reader's patience and humility are called for. Kathy H. is an ordinary young woman to whom circumstances have dealt an appalling fate; the ultimate emotional resonance of the book stems, at least in part, from that necessary ordinariness. And those who listen to her story will find themselves amply rewarded by this ambitious, peculiar and deeply affecting book."    -- Claire Messud

   -- Nation

"[A] superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled novel...."

   -- Entertainment Weekly

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
Published date: 2005
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.25 x 9 inches
Weight: 1.05 pounds
Pages: 288

Publisher's Notes

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.

Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Random House Inc (2005) - from $2.00
• Paperback Reprint - Random House Inc (2006) - from $2.75

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