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Outstanding
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Chicago Sun-Times Debra Bruno
This is a novel worth reading. It's disturbing, mesmerizing, thought-provoking.
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Outstanding
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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]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Geoff Dyer
This very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.
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Outstanding
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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]
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Outstanding
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The Guardian M John Harrison
[An] extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
[A] quite wonderful novel, the best Ishiguro has written since the sublime The Remains of the Day.
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Outstanding
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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
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Outstanding
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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.
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Outstanding
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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.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books Anita Desai
There are risks in writing such a novel, and Ishiguro is not afraid to take them.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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]
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Favorable
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The Nation Claire Messud
[An] ambitious, peculiar and deeply affecting book.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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?
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Favorable
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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]
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Mixed
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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]
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Mixed
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The Economist
Thought-provoking stuff, certainly, but ultimately the style outweighs the substance.
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Mixed
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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.
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Unfavorable
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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.
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Unfavorable
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The Spectator Philip Hensher
A book with so little warmth has to rely, insecurely and with decreasing success, on the bare gestures of pathos.
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Unfavorable
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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.
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