I first encountered Never Me Let Go as a movie, which I found so devastatingly moving that reading the novel thereafter was a letdown. But when re-reading it recently, I got deeply, painfully involved.
31-year-old Kathy looks back on her time at an elite boarding school and her subsequent work as a carer, reflecting on her complicated relationship with childhood friends Ruth and Tommy. In the face of much adversity, she remains kind, generous, and forgiving. And she simply accepts the society she lives in – an alternative version of contemporary England in which clones like her are raised to serve as organ donors, destined to die after a few operations, or as carers who offer emotional support to donors. There is no resistance, no hope for Kathy or the reader, only infinite sadness.
One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense…
With particular reference to recent exploits by Russia and other nuclear powers, in January 2025, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to doom since its inception in 1947. How do we live with the possibility of our world, perhaps sooner rather than later, coming to an end in a nuclear conflagration?
Anke Peder’s utterly fascinating short book outlines how deeply nuclear awareness has penetrated all aspects of our culture across the last eight decades and how it has twisted people’s imagination, how much damage the creation and testing of nuclear weapons has already done (beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and how truly terrifying our nuclear future is likely to be.
Did you know that the uranium used to bomb the citizens of Hiroshima was mined at a forbidden site known as 'the money place' by First Nation people in northern Canada? Or have you heard about the environmental damage and social upheavals at the Atomic City of Oak Ridge? And how about the bikini swimwear? Did you know that the gaze on a woman's belly button was that of military men carrying out atomic bombardments on the Bikini Atoll while fetishising 'sex bombs' and (an)atomic 'bombshells'? And how about the poor Pacific Islanders who got their atolls blown to pieces.…
I have long been skeptical about claims that the consumption of certain media products was responsible for users’ criminal acts, other forms of (mis)behaviour, or indeed mental disorders. But I have also been puzzled, and disturbed, by the fixation of so many (especially young) people on their smartphones and other small screens. In addition, I have observed in my circle of friends and relatives examples of teenagers’ wholesale withdrawal from the physical into a digital world.
Based on many dozen empirical studies from around the world, Jonathan Haidt’s book makes a compelling argument that the use of smartphones and social media from circa 2010 onwards has indeed fundamentally changed the minds and behaviour of young people, and not for the better.
An urgent and insightful investigation into the collapse in youth mental health, from the influential social psychologist and international bestselling author
Jonathan Haidt has spent his career speaking truth and wisdom in some of the most difficult spaces - communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the mental health emergency hitting teenagers today in many countries around the world.
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt shows how, between 2010 and 2015, childhood and adolescence got rewired. As teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones packed with social media apps, time online soared, including time spent…
What is the attraction of violence? What is the relationship between real and imagined violence? Can and should a violent person’s mind be reprogrammed? These questions are raised by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), one of the biggest box office hits of the early 1970s and the subject of intense controversies. The film is a graphically violent, sexually explicit, wickedly funny, visually stunning, and highly ambiguous adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel.
Decades after my first, deeply disturbing encounter with the film, I wrote this book, which draws on extensive archival research and explores its themes and style as well as its production, marketing, and reception, against the backdrop of key developments in British and American cinema, culture, and society from the 1950s to the early 1970s.
