Never Let Me Go

by Ishiguro, Kazuo
ISBN: 9781400043392
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Overview

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Author: Ishiguro, Kazuo
  • ISBN: 9781400043392
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.50 x 1.20
  • Number Of Pages: 304
  • Publication Year: 2005

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  • This book broke my heart, but in the best possible way.

    Samantha C. - 3 years ago

    Never Let Me Go is very loosely the story of three children who grow up at a boarding school with all the classic cliques, drama, and turmoil that includes. But there is also a very subtle, yet pervasive and sinister feeling that haunted me as I was reading and not until much later in the book did I understand what is was and why; I got it once the children had grown up and learned for themselves the gravity of their fate. This book broke my heart, but in the best possible way. Ishiguro's books are often subtle, unique, genre-bending and are absolutely beautiful, perfect gems.

    HPB Staff Review

  • “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..."

    Jennifer N. - 5 years 7 months ago

    On the surface, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is about a cast of unlikeable characters; one woman forgoing her dream of becoming an independent office worker and another’s second chance at love. Ruth is manipulative and narrator Kath is her “natural successor;” their fraught friendship reminiscent of the cliques of middle school experience--a fictional Amber and Katie--although I’m sure the Ruth and Kath dynamic is a universal truth at some point in every life, which is what makes Ishiguro’s novel so engrossing. Tommy is the male tie that binds the two female figures together. He has “a bad temper, but a big heart” and overcomes childhood bullying ostensibly by his peers due to his lack of creative genius but actually by society for his intuitive understanding of the creature they created him to be. The trio are like Tommy’s three separate sketches of a kind of frog – except with a long tail as though a part of it had stayed a tadpole. “These two I did thinking they were made of metal…But this one here, I thought I’d try making him rubbery.” Ruth and Kath are metal and Tommy stands apart in his rubbery uniqueness and resilience. Or maybe Ruth is made of rubber, leaving Kath and Tommy the metallic survivors. Or perhaps Kath the sole rubber tadpole carer with Ruth and Tommy metal donors swimming off into completion in the end...Like the life cycle of a frog, the trio comes full circle: “We were always trying to find things out… But Ruth wasn’t like that. She always wanted to believe in things.” Metallic logic; rubbery belief. The novel is divided into three parts with Hailsham being the first and foundational. Hailsham is both the boarding school where the three meet as children and a microcosm of the world and yet eerily set apart from society in a way that is revealed as the novel unfolds. Ishiguro’s slip into the second person “you” makes the reader feel as if she is part of the “club,” the elite society that is Hailsham. “How you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at ‘creating’...Things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.” While the characters seem quirky at first glance, it was the underlying premise for their existence that compelled me. The most significant scene in the story takes place when the clones confront their “guardians” from Hailsham. The retired headmistress explains, “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… As a single woman who desires to be a mother, I have been researching embryo donation for the past 18 months. After pursuing IVF, my cousins gave birth to healthy triplets with the intent to donate the remaining embryos as snowflakes of hope to loving homes. I was struck by the parallels between embryo adoption into loving families versus donation for stem cell research and medical cures! If anything, Ishiguro’s novel compelled me of the urgency toward activism on behalf of these frozen babies! As Kath says, “It might be just some trend that came and went. But for us, it’s our life.” The title derives from a song that profoundly affects Kath as a child and one of the headmistresses who observes her. “You see, I imagined it was about this woman who’d been told she couldn’t have babies. But then she had one, and she was so pleased, and she was holding it ever so tightly to her breast, really afraid something might separate them, she’s going baby, baby, never let me go…When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one bit she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.” Never Let Me Go compels us to question ethics in the realm of science and medicine and the hierarchy we use to evaluate worth: which people are valuable, how they achieve value, and if value is a standard to be achieved or inherent as a human being.

  • Read the book before you see the movie.

    Bryan H. - 5 years 7 months ago

    You will find no space ships or aliens in Kazuo Ishiguro's masterfully written Never Let Me Go. This is science fiction for the rest of us, grounded and set in a world not entirely unlike our own. The characters as well are both intimate and familiar. Embark on a journey with them as you and they simultaneously discover the tragic truths behind their seemingly perfect upbringings. Read the book before you see the movie; the twist at the end is so much more rewarding on paper.

    HPB Staff Review

  • Brilliant

    HPB S. - 5 years 10 months ago

    The last time I read it was over 10 years ago, but it is one of the books that sticks for life.

  • You will be horrified, your heart will break, it will never let you go.

    Lori B. - 5 years 11 months ago

    It has the atmosphere of a coming of age novel about boarding schools children while the horror is kept right out vision. It is possibly one of the best books written. Even if you know all of the book's secrets, it still keeps your riveted to the end. If you like sci-fi that is a slightly altered version of our reality, I think this is a book for you. Ishiguro is a masterful writer and this is his best (IMHO)!