Never Let Me Go

A haunting dystopian masterpiece that explores what it means to be human through the eyes of characters who discover they were created for a horrific purpose.

Kathy H. is a thirty-one-year-old "carer" who looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. Along with her friends Ruth and Tommy, Kathy grew up in an environment that was both nurturing and strangely isolated, where the students were encouraged to create art but never prepared for conventional futures.

As the novel progresses, Ishiguro gradually reveals the terrible truth: Kathy and her classmates are clones, created solely to serve as organ donors for "normal" humans. Their education at Hailsham was an experiment to see if clones could develop souls through exposure to art and culture. Now, as adults, they face their destiny—first as carers for other clones undergoing donations, then as donors themselves until they "complete."

The brilliance of Never Let Me Go lies in its restraint. Ishiguro never sensationalizes the horror of his premise. Instead, he focuses on the interior lives of his characters, their relationships, their hopes, and their quiet acceptance of their fate. The most devastating aspect of the novel is how normal the characters seem—they fall in love, experience jealousy, create art, and dream of the future, even as that future is circumscribed by their biological purpose.

We are all, Ishiguro suggests, living with the knowledge of our own mortality, trying to find meaning and connection in the time we have. The clones' situation is merely an extreme version of the human condition. Kathy's narration is masterful—wistful, observant, and heartbreakingly matter-of-fact about horrors that should be unthinkable.