Never Let Me Go

ByKazuo Ishiguro

Release Date: 2005-04-05
Genre: Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Score: 4

From 1,355 Ratings

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 • 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.

Reviews

Worst, but worthy.
5
By ADefendorf
I didn’t think I’d love the writing style, but dang if the story doesn’t just draw you in. You want to learn how things pan out for the main characters, you want to hear the nuances of their days. What a beautiful, crushing end.
disturbing and haunting
5
By epopovitz
I didn’t like it at first but once I got into that rhythm of it and the storyteller’s way of revealing what was to come, I was hooked.
Never let me go
5
By vonschroedburg
Masterpiece!!!!
Slow
3
By OregonJoereads
Slow book, in my opinion it never gets too interesting and the ending really isn’t too satisfying.
Good read
3
By retrojusticeb
Interesting read, the ending was a bit anti climatic.
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.