Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

  • Release Date: 2005-04-05
  • Genre: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Score: 4
4
From 1,115 Ratings
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Description

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.

One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century

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 where 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 special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

Reviews

  • Good read

    5
    By saulATXG
    I Like the story and the details not as sad as many said but overall I enjoyed the read however the movie gets zero stars for me not even a bit like the book

  • Sad and disturbing later 20th century alternative history

    4
    By fractaldragon
    Lean almost simple 1st person narrative of a particular direction the UK could have pursued after WWII. I almost don’t want to call this Sci-fi. Story builds over several decades. Even the climax and denouement are not shocking or a great surprise. But ultimately it leaves me frustrated, disturbed and sad. A very curious response for me to Sci-fi.

  • No Spoilers

    2
    By mapafrev
    For me, this book felt like one big run-on sentence. I initially enjoyed the first-person narration, it felt like I was having an intimate conversation with the main character. After awhile, it felt rambling. Chapter after chapter, I kept waiting for some kind of big revelation. It never came. What could have been a thrilling reveal in the plot was delivered in an anticlimactic way. The main characters’ friendships, memories, and worries were written about extensively, but still they somehow felt flat and robotic. Perhaps this was intentional, given the plot, but I struggled to feel connected to them.

  • The Sequence of Detail

    5
    By Mind Asylum
    An amazing play of writing. Never Let Me Go is subtle with the heart while showcasing a human experience.

  • Ishiguro’s book about friendship

    4
    By Scott's take on things
    This is an intense novel about memory and friendship. The fact the kids are doomed to die early provides the context for the exploration. The details a reader might want to know about the how this evil system came to be, how the “donation” process actually works, why the “completion” takes so long, why didn’t some of them just kill the themselves etc. are not discussed. Consequently, all these intense friendships and endless discussions don’t ring entirely true. But this dystopian story is not about those other things and what Ishiguro is able to do is focus on friendships and memory in a brutal environment.

  • May Make You Nauseous

    5
    By Sandaleen
    Probably as good from a literary standpoint as everyone seems to think it is. If you are human, however, it may make you nauseous.

  • What’s the point?

    1
    By Pectown
    If you want to read hundreds of pages about clueless children having immature and vacuous discourse, then this is the book for you! What a piece of literary crap.

  • Avoiding the issue

    1
    By Backroad Rider
    This is a book about cloned people who are to provide vital organs and then file. But this issue is not really addressed. The characters seeem to accept their future and instead are concerned only with personal relationships amounst themselves. Like “The Remains of the Day” the books is composted of flashbacks.

  • Star crossed love in a dystopian future

    5
    By chuckthinks
    This is a love story set in a subtly dystopian future. The author carefully creates his main characters, paragraph by paragraph , their relationships, and the world that they live in. The impression of ordinary human teenage and young adult angst as the characters navigate their way through life is almost but not quite right. There is something wrong, something not quite right about this world. The story balances this sense of strangeness with relatable and complex characters through whom we experience this world. We follow the protagonist from her young teenage years and experience with her the ups and downs of friendships, love, and transitioning to adulthood. The reader is drawn all the more closely to her as she is able to be with the love of her life. The reader feels her heartbreak all the more powerfully as the author brings the story to a surprising and tragic finale.

  • Fine to read…But don’t raise your expectations… all in all mediocre

    3
    By LSA031110
    I got the idea the book would be much different than it actually was. While I can not say this book was bad, I can also say that it didn’t have me at the edge of my seat. During the first part I mostly was confused, because of the lack of context given it was difficult to understand why the narrator was feeding certain stories. Any sort of romance came together at the very last minute. To be honest even after finishing while I understood the plot I’m trying to understand what I could’ve possibly missed, because this book is not as good as many imply

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