Now this is an amazing book. Superbly crafted, achingly poignant, beautiful and ozzing with sophisticated simplicity.
Ishiguro guides you into this world with Kathy the narrator who reminisces about her time at Hailsham, her school, her friendships with Tommy and Ruth and the hauntingly realisation of her purpose in the world.
The book is divided into thirds. Her time at Hailsham, the immediate years after they leave and then probably 12 years after that.
It's a version of contemporary England but this isn't science fiction, it feels deeply real and engaging with the themes of loss of innocence and the fragility of life.
I couldn't put it down, mourned when I finsihed it and will be recommending it to lots of people.
Read it and love it. ( )

The experience of reading "Never Let Me Go" happens to the reader in layers. There is the first and most obvious, the reveal of what this book is about -- the realization that occurs to the reader much in the same way it occurred, apparently, to the characters: we are told but not told. There is no hiding, no equivocation; it's all there from page one, but in such a way that it seeps in, never giving us or the characters a chance to react until it is too late.

There is also the layer of setting, and the way the author has managed to portray the school, Hailsham, so vividly. What we are brought into is so precisely the society that springs up, much like a virus, in any closed institutionalized setting. The social stratosphere, the cliques, the whispers, the way things are done and not done. The rules -- and not those imposed on the inhabitants, but the ones they make for themselves, as if somehow they have no choice but to institutionalize themselves even more stringently than is being done to them. Hailsham has all of this.

And then there is the layer of the characters themselves: Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, mostly, and Kathy most specifically of the three. Her thoughts, wants, loves and desires. And when we relate to her as a person, this is where all of those layers collide. Relating to Kathy, we are drawn into the world Ishiguro has created, that last final step -- and that world was already disturbingly familiar. ( )

Slice of life in an alternate timeline? (Perhaps that's enough of a spoiler there.) The story, per the book synopsis, is simply about Kathy, as she meets up with a couple of old friends, and reminisces about their time in Hailsham, revealing to readers what it is that makes these people special. Everything is subtle and evenly-paced, so it may be slow moving for most people. I loved it, however, despite the fact that nothing too much really changed between the beginning and the end. It's about living and discovering... and gives food for thought. ( )

How does one that is born in Japan, although moved to England at the age of 6, manage to portray life (and death) at an English girls school? I was unaware when I started reading what the book was to be about and was a bit perplexed when I discovered what a "carer" really was. The booked did unnerve me in that I perhaps wanted an out where the “carer" would escape her fate. But what really amazed me is that I could not really believe how English it all was despite the Author's origin

Ishiguro is a rare magician of a writer, whose prose is so deceptively simple and yet haunting. This book broke me and made me sob at the end. In a good way. ( )