Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
 
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
 
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.
 
Time named Never Let Me Go as the best novel of 2005 and one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.  The novel was made into a movie in 2010.
 
 
Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-)  is one of the most critically-acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in English, being awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its 2017 citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were noted for their explorations of Japanese identity and their mournful tone. He thereafter explored other genres, including science fiction and historical fiction. He has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize four times, winning the prize in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 1993. Salman Rushdie praised the novel as Ishiguro's masterpiece, in which he "turned away from the Japanese settings of his first two novels and revealed that his sensibility was not rooted in any one place, but capable of travel and metamorphosis".