Kazuo Ishiguro – “Never Let Me Go”

Publ: 2005 ISBN:0571224113
Rating: ***

This novel was the Booker Prize runner-up; a nominee for James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I wasn’t over-enamoured with the book but it put me in mind of a John Wyndham novel.
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods - and about their futures.


KAZUO ISHIGURO was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain in 1960. He attended the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of East Anglia. He now lives in London. He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third novel, The Remains of the Day. He has been awarded an OBE for his contribution to literature and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.