Will I love Never Let Me Go?

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… show more.

I love the exquisite writing and haunting narrative in this book—Ishiguro’s prose is masterful, his imagination precise and engrossing. He creates characters that are poignant, complex, and caught in a world beyond their control. Issues of bioengineering, of empathy, of powerlessness, are beautifully woven through the whole.

I am moved by how this book marries technology and deep emotion, the dystopian with the palpable reality of today’s world, and the rapidly changing technological milieu we live in.

I remember reading The Remains of the Day and the profound sadness that I felt at the novel’s end, as Mr. Stevens recognizes, with utmost regret but heartbreaking resolve, his great love for Miss Kenton, which, of course, was lost as he never acted on it. He realizes that his devotion to “order” and to “duty” mattered, but that love matters, too—that it matters more!

Though Never Let Me Go is often cast as a sci-fi novel, it’s not that at all. It’s The Remains of the Day with the love story front and center—this time, a love triangle. Stand… show more.

Although it's about a dystopian future, the book grabs you with its fine writing, originality, characters, and, in the end, sweetness.

A deeply moving examination of mortality through an unexpected lens. The direct--"this is normal"--voice of the main character/narrator, as against the reader's slowly emerging awareness that things are anything but normal was extraordinarily powerful. Books do not make me cry; this book came as close as possible.

This is not a novel with a surprise, twist ending. Rather, it's a story that reveals secrecy in incremental degrees. Little by little we find out what the protagonist knows and does not yet know about her circumstances and destiny. Incidents that do not seem particularly monumental to us are revealed as she reflects on her memories, with their importance not to be understood by the reader until later on. By the time we've figured out what's going on (I won't spoil things by revealing what that is), we are invested in the lives of the central characters. Once invested,… show more.

It may be the best book ever written. Okay, that is hyperbole. But this is literary science fiction with a powerful social message. This is literary science fiction with wonderful and evocative scenes of childhood and young love. This is literary science fiction which prompts emotion and thought, which means this book becomes a dialogue between you and the author. Of course, in such masterful storytelling, you care about the characters and what happens to them. The storyline is terribly sad but I felt uplifted for having read this book. This was, in fact, my second reading (listening).

I cannot forget this book, even though, at times, I am desperate to do so. Ishiguro, one of my chosen authors and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is beyond masterful in the unique way he portrays quotidian events before a horror that is almost theatrical in its grotesquerie.

I was deeply disturbed while reading it, yet I could not put it down. Years later, I continue to find it a source of disquiet regarding where our culture/society is going and how we must stop a very particular trend. The trend is increasingly toward science and technology that utterly… show more.

This book sold me on “bittersweetness” as the most important tone I want to write toward. One of the story's most “bitter” turns is the confirmation that art cannot change one’s life or rescue a loved one from a doomed fate.

But though art can't dull the pain of moving through life, it's proof that something endured long enough to assert its existence, however quietly and quickly it passes.

One of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest novels (among many), this book, imagines an alternative world in which humans are cloned as a source of organ donations for the wealthy.

The novel is unique in that it does not dwell at length (in fact, hardly at all) on the actual technology underlying the story’s premise. Rather, it is primarily the story of well-developed characters and their relationships with one another as they navigate their way through this nightmarish world.

I became deeply invested in the fates of the three main characters, while also imagining what life would be like in… show more.