Never Let Me Go: Summary and book reviews of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, plus links to an excerpt from Never Let Me Go and a biography of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hardcover: Apr 2005,
320 pages.
Paperback: Mar 2006,
304 pages.
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 and love.
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.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that
long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy
recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls
growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she
describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a
dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of
hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their
childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an
extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo
Ishiguro's finest work.
BOOK REVIEWS
BookBrowse
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. Full Review (496 words).
Media Reviews
Booklist - Allison Block
In this luminous offering, he nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain.
Library Journal - Henry L. Carrigan (starred review)
Ishiguro's elegant prose and masterly ways with characterization make for a lovely tale of memory, self-understanding, and love.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives-without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have "tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn't matter." ... A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
So exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. . . . An epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. . . . Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
The Independent (UK) - Geoff Dyer
The problem for the reviewer, appropriately enough, is that by revealing more of what the book is about he risks going too far and unravelling its meticulously woven fabric of hints and guesses. So I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that this very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.
The Sunday Times (UK) - Peter Kemp
Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro
written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness. That he
contrives to do so in a narrative crawling with creepy frissons is remarkable.
Not the least out-of-the-ordinary feature of this novel, with its piercing
questions about humanity and humaneness, is the way it affectingly moves past
gothic shudders to a wrenchingly desolate ending.
The Telegraph (UK) - Caroline Moore Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the
solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of
full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost
but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said,
glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly.
The Guardian (UK) - M John Harrison
This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Mike Pearson Hauntingly beautiful I read the book after watching the movie. So my understanding of the plot was already formed before I read a page. The film moved me and the book even more so. The themes are hauntingly alive to me. The idea of our own known mortality that we all... Read More
Rated of 5
by Peter V. Brilliant, even if nonsensical I read this book with patience, then after watching the movie I felt I had to re-read it again. It is a brilliant book,raising a lot of interesting questions. I am avoiding on purpose the link between the topic of cloning and reality, because if... Read More
War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that AS Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.
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I read The Healing in two sittings it is a fascinating story of plantation life at the beginning of the Civil War. Granada, a slave newborn child...
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(496 words).
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
of 5
by Mike Pearson
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