November/Dec Book Club: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

For our next book club, we decided on Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. A couple members had read it already and highly recommended it. It is a dystopian science ficiton novel released in 2005, and was also adapted into a film in 2010 starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield.

According to Goodreads:

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.

Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.