Never Let Me Go

By: Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor

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 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century • A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years

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.

On the meaning of life

I ended up recommending this book to a colleague who teaches a philosophy class entitled "The Good Life." He plans on using it, saying it is the best novel that he has found so far.

Because that is what the book is about and that is why it seems slow to some people. It is not action packed. The novel will not go places that you would expect a movie to go -- revolution, loud cries for justice. Though the characters seem to be very different from us, they are not. Their lives are just compressed. In their childhoods they understand and don't understand what their lives will be. They have opportunity to have all the things that philosophers says makes life worth living: friends, love, study, work, everything except children.

The book makes us ask, if this is all there is, is life worth living?

Not a children's book

I thought this was a lovely listen. Great narrator and the story is beautifully written. As others have commented, the story is not a mystery, and isn't written as such. Haunting.

Food for thought

This novel is well-written and well-read, and as other reviewers have pointed out, it makes you think.

The only difficulty I had was that I found it difficult to suspend disbelief and accept this alternate world. This is possibly because it's in the "Contemporary" category rather than Science Fiction where I think it ultimately belongs, but more, I couldn't square the real science and controversy behind this subject with the alternate reality. One only has to look at the political dust-up over mere stem cell research to see how ultimately unrealistic this story is in this setting; in this time period.

But that is my only criticism.

It is a good, solid story.

Fantastic

I didn't want the story to end. The characters haunted me weeks later. I have listened to it several times. I recommended to my book club and many thought it was the best read of the year. Eerie and heartbreaking.

Not science fiction, but social science fiction

I'll try not to reveal too much. This story centers on a group of adolescents and young adults conceived and raised separately to provide a "benefit" to modern English society at large. They live at a separate boarding school whose purpose is to cultivate them and protect them for this function. Ishiguro creates a world that is for the most part quite believable. It includes the daily activities, inner thoughts, dreams, and tragedies of these young people, as well as some of the conflicts felt by their guardians. From some of the other reviews, I guess this novel is not for everyone. I found it engaging, thought-provoking, suspenseful, and compassionate. The questions raised for me by this story are "What if a modern society conspired to use people this way? What is the value of a human soul?" Uncomfortable to think about...but fascinating at the same time.