"...complaining about how memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don't go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading. I lost Ruth, and I lost Tommy, but I won't lose my memories of them."

For a novel that packs so much broiling emotion in theme and plot, it's surprising that among so many waiting-to-boil paragraphs, this relatively tame passage are the most impactful words in the whole novel. The rest are very controlled, bordering on the absurd. From a title that is very strong... the novel goes on a very timed and restrained prose. In the dispassionate text, you'll want a volcano that is about to explode, but it never happens... AND THAT's WHERE THE MAGIC IS.

Perhaps it's the natural style by Ishiguro to deliver broiling emotion by leaving 80% unsaid. And since the narrative is first person, it is perfect for the protagonist's grab for empathy from us readers. The injustice, wrongness, and sadness of it all carries on on how Kathy presents their ultimately-oppressed lives, like natural, reality, everyday news.

This novel is also relatively short compared with other of Ishiguro's work. It seems like a quick read, but the other review is correct in saying that it stays on you for a long time afterwards.

Just suspend your Science, Social, and Governmental Regulations clamors (arguing against how realistic the novel is), and enjoy how great Literature can be with novels like this. Very sad, yes, but how can you widen perspective with just happy endings?

I have read 4 or 5 of Ishiguro's novels and for me this one was much bigger, fuller, more alive in its scope and humanity than the ones before (and even before I thought he was one of the best authors of our time, equalled, to me, only by Anne Michaels, although I haven't formally studied English).

Whilst all the books I have read were in the first person, in this one he manages to use, for me, the first person almost as a third person window on events, even though the voice is always in the dark, looking for answers to the questions that maybe we are all looking for answers to. This "third person window" is not all-knowing as they sometimes are, but has a detached, not-giving answers aspect and feels therefore powerful, frightening, tension creating, demanding you read on.

In previous books the narrator's characters and "flaws" seem to frame their engagement with their lives and therefore the outcomes of the books. In this book, it is the narrator's lack of knowledge and age, and how these interact (and how you see her as young and in the hands of something bigger, of which she is only slowly aware) which moves the plot and the reader's desire to "find out" what this bigger thing is.

Whereas in previous books, the narrators seem quite particular people, in this the narrator seems so normal, the way her childhood is somehow simultaneously experienced and recalled seems, to me, the way I experience the remembering of my growing up, the way I am always re-visiting, re-making my memories in my trying to understand things which I seem to always have felt to some extent I didn't understand, influences on me which were bigger and hidden.

It was the achievement of this sensation which made the book outstanding for me, the plot being a vehicle for it. But the plot is very very gripping in itself, and when you do "find out", the answers definately do not dissapoint the tension which has created the desire to know, something I maybe felt with one of Ishiguro's previous books.

I wondered what Ishiguro was trying to tell us with his "Never let me go". It seems we live in a world where decisions are made without regard to human compassion and we are all human, right? "Never let me go" seems to explore the basic instincts of attachments between people and these attachments assist us in realising who we are. But why are we here? You quickly begin to realise with characters surnames existing of letters only that the main characters are making up numbers, are they people?
Kathy H is a carer of donors. Donors who complete usually by their third or fourth donation. Kathy H and Tommy D have an attachment but Tommy D is resigned to his fate and Kathy H accepts.
The complexity of the relationships between Ruth, Kathy and Tommy make them every bit human but Kathy's honest about her own feelings seems to enable her to be more compassionate and hence a better carer.
I see Ishiguro's book as a fairytale at an adult level with the usual characters of the wicked witch, the princess and her prince.