Why ‘Never Let Me Go’ is a Novel You Should Read Right Now

Kazuo Ishiguro’s twisted award-winning 2005 novel is one of the best I’ve ever read. Here’s why.

Brian Rowe
Read. Watch. Write. Repeat.

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Photo by Pexels at Pixabay

The Story

Never Let Me Go tells of a society where clones are educated and brought up solely to provide their vital organs for regular people in the world. The novel is told in first person, past tense, double-I from the perspective of a woman named Kathy, one of the clones who is reflecting on her life story. The book takes place over three parts. In the first part, Kathy and her two best friends Ruth and Tommy live in an idyllic location in England called Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school where they live year-round, never to leave and explore past specific fences around the property. Strange occurrences start to irk Kathy even from a young age, where she notices the strange teachers staring at her in her room, and listens to stories about the gruesome murders of students who made it out of the school grounds.

It is in the second part, where the trio has finally left the school for a place called the Cottages, where Ruth and Tommy begin a romance and Kathy starts to realize the true nature of their lives. It turns out that everyone who started at Hailsham are effectively clones who were created specifically to donate their…

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