Never Let Me Go (International Edition) - Softcover

Ishiguro-kazuo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571258093 ISBN 13: 9780571258093

Publisher: FisicalBook, 2010

Synopsis

**OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD**
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
#9 in the New York Times ''100 Best Books of the 21st Century''

‘Brilliantly executed.’
MARGARET ATWOOD

‘A page-turner and a heartbreaker.’
TIME

‘Masterly.’
SUNDAY TIMES

One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author

Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

''Exquisite.''
GUARDIAN

''A feat of imaginative sympathy.''
NEW YORK TIMES

What readers are saying:

''A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking even after finishing it.''
''I loved it, every single word of it.''
''It took me wholly by surprise.''
''Utterly beautiful.''
''Essentially perfect.''

About this title

Review

All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler

From the Inside Flap

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: FisicalBook
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0571258093
• ISBN 13: 9780571258093
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 282