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Description
none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some
of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you ...’
England, late 1990s. Kathy H., a carer, looks back on her school-days at Hailsham. It is an idyllic place, with an art room, playing fields and a duck pond – but a very different life awaits its pupils after they graduate. Kept isolated from the outside world, they begin dimly to understand that one day they will have to make ‘donations’, though the nature of these is unclear. Rumours circulate: that the winners of art competitions, or couples who are in love, will be exempt. But neither their privileged education, nor the love between Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy, can save them from their eventual fate.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005, this is both an ingenious dystopian fable and an unforgettable story of friendship, love and the value of human life. Like the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, also published by The Folio Society, it is above all a story of lost innocence. Kazuo Ishiguro shows a protagonist looking back on a seemingly happy past that appears very different in retrospect.
This Folio edition contains a new introduction by Claire Messud, award-winning author of The Emperor’s Children. She describes Ishiguro’s novel as belonging to a ‘thin but intense literary vein that runs from King Lear to Beckett and beyond, works that lay bare the human condition in its stark fundamentals … Without fanfare or Dostoevskian histrionics, Never Let Me Go joins the ranks of these abiding works.’ This is artist Kate Miller’s first commission for The Folio Society. Her beautiful, multi-layered illustrations have been praised by Kazuo Ishiguro as ‘subtly gorgeous and full of poignance’.
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SpoilerI'd already seen the film, so knew this would be a deep and heartaching read. This is honestly one of my favourite reads now, the friendships are loving, flawed - the usual envy and adoration so well written. The characters are complex and interesting. The topic is unnerving, it's so matter of fact and horrific, and you wonder how people justify it but they simply do, getting on with their lives.
It was like watching "The Island" from the periphery, if it was set 30 years earlier and you couldn't really see what's going on.
How am i supposed to find closure now?This guy should pay for my therapy-----I've finally cleared my mind enough to write a review for this.never let me go is a very plotless story and it reads like the flashback montage of a movie and i guess that's what it actually is.the story starts with our narrator Kathy telling us that she's a carer and that she's finally got her first notice for a donation after picking her own schoolmates to look after for 11 years. right from the start she starts mentioning Hailsham, Tommy and Ruth and as the book progresses you come to realize exactly who these people are and what they mean to Kathy.right off the bat i started asking myself questions. what is Hailsham? what are these donations about? why are they raising a bunch of children in an isolated place and teach them art? what does that have to do with donations?but fear not! i got my answers at the end in a very.....straight forward way in form of long monologues by an old lady's reminiscing the past.there is only one question i have that's been unanswered but i won't ask it for the sake of leaving this review spoiler free