Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

3.5 (12)
$17.00

Product Details

Web ID: 15624548

Nobel prize winner. From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes and a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic. As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hail sham, 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.

  • Product Features

    • Suggested age range- Adult
    • Format- Paperback
    • Dimensions- 7. 9" W x 5. 1" H x 0. 65" D
    • Genre- Fiction
    • Publisher- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Publication date- 03-14-2006
    • Page count- 304
    • ISBN- 9781400078776
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Ratings & Reviews

3.5/5

12 star ratings & reviews

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3 months ago
from London

a coming of age novel.

The book centres around the narrator (Kathy) who is best friends with four or five other children in a boarding school which they just call Hailsham probably because this is where it’s located in England. They all share a dormitory and are watched over by a head mistress who is just called Madame. There are also guardians who are, I’m guessing, like form teachers and the book just initially covers what the children get up to. I’m guessing the intake of children for Hailsham ranges from the ages of nought to 16 years old. But it seems like that the children are actually born there and our taught life lessons which cover the fact that they will never have children themselves. I get the impression that the children are born sterilised because it’s not mentioned that it’s a process that they go through. The initial chapters of the book are divided up into age groups and anything significant that happens within those age groups which is told from the narrators point of view. A lot of the negativity revolves around Tommy, who is Kathy‘s best friend it seems, and who gets picked on a lot or just left out of activities and it’s the narrator who is usually the one to comfort him, as best she can, given the circumstances that they are in. Then when they come of age, they progress onto a new form of living arrangement. They move into the cottages. They seem to have been kept in the same groups that they were in in Hailsham. But are also mingling with the veterans who have been in the cottage’s a bit longer. Here they are subdivided again into new groups. Some of them are going to be Carers and some of them are going to be donors. I think that the donors are actually human organ donors, so the carers obviously have to look after them. And this is how it’ll be for the rest of their lives it seems, with them not meeting anybody else outside of the groups that they were in growing up. This is what the book is about. It’s a coming of age story for Kathy, Tommy and Ruth and is set in a form of dystopian society in the near future where people are just raised to be living donors or those that are going to care for them. How their lives have been mapped out for them since attending the school in Hailsham and how they are continuing to follow the paths that have been decided for them. I enjoyed the book as a whole, but that’s mainly because I didn’t know what to expect from it. Although I had read a review prior, but I just didn’t remember what the book was meant to be about. It is however, a good read and it is very well written and a little 🤏 bit emotional.

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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

6 months ago

3 stars

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro I struggled to get through the first 150ish pages and I was thisclose to DNF’ing, but I pushed through and.. meh. For a short book with such a disturbing yet intriguing premise, this was tedious as hell to read. Hailsham is an elite boarding school located somewhere in England. Classes are taught by “guardians” and in between the mostly arts and crafts curriculum, students are encouraged to remain healthy for their future careers as “carers” and “donors”. I understand why this is so highly rated by some because it does raise questions about humanity and individuality. What does it mean to be human? What’s our purpose in this life? What makes up a life? Do we have souls? Overall, due to the narration and execution, I felt quite bored and detached from the characters and their plight. Perhaps the movie adaptation will do a better job at retaining my attention. Rating: 3/5 ⭐️

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

11 months ago

pls leave me alone

The description of this book makes it sound like you’re going to have a sweet little coming of age book with some kids in an english school. Instead you get a highly predictable dystopian novel. With a weird fixation on sex. I genuinely don’t at at all understand why this girl, who is taking care of her childhood friend, who has undergone massive surgery and is bedridden for the next hot minute, NEEDS to have sex with him. He is IMMOBILE. And! I just hated the way that they would start a story, but splice it up with a “to understand that you must know” story, and splice it again with another story. I have no idea why it couldn’t have just been linear story telling, especially since, by the end of all of that, the story they kicked it all off with is usually just really boring.

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

2 years ago
from B&N Home Office

A Nightmare You Don't Want to Wake Up From

How can something so horrific be rendered so beautifully? This book expands on the notion of what it means to be human as defined by the relationships we establish during our time. It’s lush and provocative and will lead you down the rabbit hole of Ishiguro.

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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

2 years ago
from OR

Captivating and Haunting

Synopsis: The story follows Kathy who, along with her friends, attend a very exclusive boarding school in the secluded English countryside. You quickly learn that this is no ordinary school and these are definitely not ordinary children. Review: This was such a unique read. Haunting and sad but also sweet and captivating. It reads like you’re having a casual conversation with Kathy and when I found out they made it into a movie I had to watch it as soon as I was done reading. Highly recommend!

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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

3 years ago

Great premise but ending could have been better

Love the idea of this book but there should have been about 50 more pages to make it a proper "dystopian" novel

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

3 years ago
from Boston

Dystopian Cautionary Tale

Pay no attention to the poor reviews. This is a masterpiece that will have trying to answer questions about this world, only to be haunted by questions much larger than these characters. This story is disarming and lulls you into at times accepting the reality created for these characters and their kind by those who would exploit them. A cautionary tale of a type of enslavement that has been a constant in human history. Is this the next sad chapter in our existence?

Recommends this product

Customer review from barnesandnoble.com

4 years ago
from New York

Beautiful.

Elegant story of hope and loss. Heartbreaking.

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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com