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Never Let Me Go
A Novel
by Kazuo Ishiguro


8.8

based on 34 reviews
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based on 49 votes
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Official Publisher Site

The Booker Prize-winning author of Remains Of The Day offers a dystopian tale about a 31-year-old woman who reflects upon her childhood days at the isolated English boarding school Hailsham, slowly revealing to the reader the dark secrets at the heart of that institution.

Knopf, 304 pages
04/05/2005
$24.00

ISBN: 1400043395

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Chicago Sun-Times Debra Bruno

This is a novel worth reading. It's disturbing, mesmerizing, thought-provoking.

Entertainment Weekly Mark Harris

After you read it, give it to a friend. You'll want to have someone to argue with. [8 April 2005, p. 69]

Kirkus Reviews

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

Los Angeles Times Richard Eder

Ishiguro has the audacity and technical mastery to wind us through a mystification as irritating as it is ingenious in a novel that may be his best, and which is certainly his most resonant and moving.

Publishers Weekly

Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.

Slate Margaret Atwood

Never Let Me Go is unlikely to be everybody's cup of tea. The people in it aren't heroic. The ending is not comforting. Nevertheless, this is a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a glass, darkly.

The Independent Geoff Dyer

This very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Andre Alexis

Never Let Me Go is rather like a snapshot of the moral imagination of England in the late 1990s. It is, as well as being a work of science fiction, a metaphysical documentary, a very beautiful one. [19 Mar. 2005, D3]

The Guardian M John Harrison

[An] extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel.

Washington Post Jonathan Yardley

[A] quite wonderful novel, the best Ishiguro has written since the sublime The Remains of the Day.

Salon Andrew O'Hehir

"Never Let Me Go" is a work of meticulous, pitch-perfect writing, but it's also an obsessive page turner that kept me up almost till dawn and left me feeling emotionally shattered

The New Republic James Wood

Given that Ishiguro's new novel is explicitly about cloning, that it is, in effect, a science fiction set in the present day, and that the odds against success in this mode are bullyingly stacked, his success in writing a novel that is at once speculative, experimental, and humanly moving is almost miraculous.

The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson

Once again, it's amazing how Ishiguro says so much, and so well, about people who themselves say so little.

New York Review Of Books Anita Desai

There are risks in writing such a novel, and Ishiguro is not afraid to take them.

The New York Times Book Review Sarah Kerr

If the novel feels a bit too distant to move us to outright heartbreak, it delivers images of odd beauty and a mounting existential distress that hangs around long after we read it.

Chicago Tribune Laura Ciolkowski

A modern attempt to grapple in prose with the problem of the human and the larger search for meaning conducted over the course of a single life. [8 May 2005]

The Nation Claire Messud

[An] ambitious, peculiar and deeply affecting book.

The Independent Andrew Barrow

Ishiguro is primarily a poet. Accuracy of social observation, dialogue and even characterisation is not his aim. In this deceptively sad novel, he simply uses a science-fiction framework to throw light on ordinary human life, the human soul, human sexuality, love, creativity and childhood innocence.

Village Voice James Browning

A 1984 for the bioengineering age, the novel is a warning and a glimpse into the future whose genius will be recognized as reality catches up.

London Review Of Books Frank Kermode

Everything is expertly arranged, as it always is in Ishiguro, but this dear-diary prose surely reduces one’s interest.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

"Never Let Me Go" is marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock's "Psycho." The remainder of the book, however, is a Gothic tour de force that showcases the same gifts that made Mr. Ishiguro's 1989 novel, "The Remains of the Day," such a cogent performance.

The New Yorker Louis Menand

Ishiguro does not write like a realist. He writes like someone impersonating a realist, and this is one reason for the peculiar fascination of his books.

Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Riemer

Undeniably, this is a gimmicky novel and that is something of a limitation. But beneath the carefully calculated revelations, this is a touching and even profound meditation on a riddle many of us prefer to ignore: what is it to be human?

Library Journal Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Ishiguro's elegant prose and masterly ways with characterization make for a lovely tale of memory, self-understanding, and love. [1 Jan. 2005, p. 98]

Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore

Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly.

Daily Telegraph Theo Tait

Inevitably, reading Never Let Me Go is not exactly an enjoyable experience. There is no aesthetic thrill to be had from the sentences -- except that of a writer getting the desired dreary effect exactly right. But the novel repays the effort in spades, building to a surprisingly moving climax and echoing around the brain for days afterwards.

Atlantic Monthly Joseph O'Neill

With its fantastic, inky bleakness, Never Let Me Go itself mutates the meaning of "Ishiguroish," or "Ishiguroesque," or whatever epithet sticks to this wonderful writer.

Booklist Allison Block

In this luminous offering, [Ishiguro] nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain.

New York Observer David Thomson

The book is well worthwhile -- the faintly warped portrait of "school life" and teenage hopes is brilliantly done, and there's a love of the wan, flat countryside of some parts of England that's steeped in melancholy. But like a lot of science fiction, this is a novel -- or a hypothesis -- taken beyond its own depth. [4 April 2005, p. 19]

The Economist

Thought-provoking stuff, certainly, but ultimately the style outweighs the substance.

San Francisco Chronicle David Kipen

We yearn for the science fiction and romantic aspects of Ishiguro's story to match and thrive. We want desperately for it to work, but somehow, in spite of all that, it never quite takes.

Houston Chronicle Jim Barloon

The story moves at an excruciatingly slow pace..., the characters are flat and unremarkable, and, worst of all, the story has been anemically imagined.

The Spectator Philip Hensher

A book with so little warmth has to rely, insecurely and with decreasing success, on the bare gestures of pathos.

Boston Globe Gail Caldwell

Oddly, unfortunately, ''Never Let Me Go" is more heartbreaking than it is affecting. The heartbreak is that of a child's, piercing and transient, but the overriding premise to this novel undermines its sentimental tugs and renders it an exercise in Gothic gloom.

The average user rating for this book is 8.8 (out of 10) based on 49 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Paul L gave it a9:
This a thought-provoking and daring story that's told in the effortless manner of a writer who is a true master of the craft. Some may criticize that the premise and characterizations are too unbelievable, yet injustices and foolishness (and the associated apathy of both the victims and enablers) in society abound. It's not that much of a stretch. Like a lot of science fiction, the story warns us of how the benefits of science and technology can sometimes quietly erode our humanity. However, unlike a lot of sci fi, it's presentation is gratefully much more subtle.

peter m gave it an8:
Like some other readers I kept asking myself why they didn't rebel or run for it instead of meekly accepting the wholely unacceptable. I think the only way to read this is as a metaphor the class system in England, which has been propped up from below for the last thousand years by those who have least to gain from it ( the continued existence of the monarchy is the epitome of this of this deference culture) and as such fits in well with other examples of Ishiguro's works like Remains of the Day. Whoever said that Ishiguro is not political is very wide of the mark.

mac b gave it a9:
Ishiguro is the pointillist of human emotions and relationships in the contemporary era. This book was a depiction of decent folk, not exceptional in talent or imagination, caught up in a nightmare not of their making, knowing the inevitability of their cruel fates but living (or as they might say in England, muddling through; or, as Roger Waters put it so aptly years ago: "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way") as normal a life as they could under the circumstances, like the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto after the Nazi occupation but before the full Holocaust was implemented. Some reviewers took Ishiguro to task for making his characters so "dull" and the events of their lives (aside from their duties as "carers" and "donors") so mundane. But Ishiguro uses such literary technique, the excruciating detailing of the ordinary, to illuminate the horror and the pathos of the slow-motion, matter-of-fact holocaust to which these "ordinary" people have been consigned. Other reviewers were displeased that Ishiguro had not provided a discernble villain and/or had not spelled out greater (melo)dramatic actions and outcomes. But anyone familiar with Ishiguro's fiction and literary style know that he is not (unlike many of our most celebrated novelists today) looking to make political points or identify easy heroes or villains. The world he gives us is our own, slightly skewed and gradually seen as horrifying. To a vegetarian, a society that casually slaughters and eats animals without a blink of an eye would be horrifying. Ishiguro, in presenting us with his "as-if" England of the 1990s through the eyes of one of the creatures whose fate it is to be consumed and showing that just such a creature, considered not quite "human," is capable of the full range of emotion and perception we attribute to "normals," asks us to ponder ourselves, what we love, and what we fear losing. This is a brilliant book.

TheKate M gave it a6:
Since I "read" this book on audio, I missed out on the font that Zach P has confessed to love. That is sad as I really do appreciate a good font. The pacing is also something translates differently in audio - but this book was refreshing to "read" because of Ishiguro's execution and the oddity of it all. Note to all writers: you automatically get a point deducted from your rating if you depend upon teasers to keep your readers reading (or listening, as the case may be).

Lisa D gave it a10:
An amazing, haunting, powerful book. It is NOT about cloning or the ethical implications...not in the least. Not any more than waiting for Godot is about 2 men waiting. Ishiguro has captured the bleakness of the modern human condition, the illusion of choice and freedom, and the horror of wasted lives which are accepted with complacency. It left me in a somewhat disturbed existential funk for days. I suspect it will stay with me for years.

Zach P gave it a9:
Everything about this book is incredible. The prose, the length, the style, even the font. I loved it.

Moki C gave it a5:
Its little substancial this book. Nevertheless I quite enjoyed reading it.

Never Let Me Go A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go
A Novel
by Kazuo Ishiguro