Synopsis from Amazon
In one of the most acclaimed and strange novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, "Never Let Me Go" hauntingly 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.

Reserved: to be sent to map-maker when read.

What a book! There are so many ways to describe it - chilling, heart-rending, depressing, very thought-provoking, but a page-turner too. It's going to haunt me for some time. I don't often give books a rating of 10.

Received from nyassa, many thanks! Can't wait to start reading this, finding the parcel on my doorstep really made my day.
Ed. 11OCT2006: Gosh, this book really has it all, doesn't it? and so beautifully written, too. One of those stories it's impossible to comment upon without giving away anything; due to the somewhat skewed nature of the book's reality it is almost a race between the reader piecing together the various underlying premises and the narrator revealing new facets of her world.

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

handed to flurillo since the book pile was toppling over and the top strata needed to be exiled, ahem, freed...

released at meeting or into the wild after.

This book had me from the first page. Which is fairly rare. Beautifully written.

A well-imagined alternate reality, kept me reading.

An Ishiguro I haven't read! *wriggles with joy*

My partner dislikes Ishiguro on the grounds that his characters are too transparently constructs - too obviously constrained by place and time, and too much of 'things were never the same after that summer and what happened with X'. To which I reply, yes, but he does it really, really, really well. There's also the argument that we're all constrained in that way, and that things never are the same after that summer, in real life. Though I'd be giving this 9.75 out of 10 if I could, for that very reason. So that miniscule niggle aside, this is glorious. A wonderfully sustained narrative in the John Wyndham tradition, and I was so, so relieved that the ending fitted.
There are questions about ethics here, and also tougher ones about the nature of humanity itself, and also farming methods (shades of Michael Faber's book 'Under the Skin', which has some similarities to this, though from a different perspective). But the complicated characters, the well-realised situations and the poignant emotions are what make this tour-de-force so very special. I see it was nominated for the Booker that year. Why the hell didn't it win? Did the Supreme Being have something out? Anyway many, many thanks for this. I devoured it. Original, powerful, profound.

Either to a fellow bookcrosser at the meeting (join us! 10.30am at the pub) or in the wilds of central manchester afterwards.

picked it up at the Bookcrossing meeting on Saturday 29th Jan. 2011

picked this up the the bookcrossing meeting this past saturday...yesterday, as it were. Thanks!

Victim of my 2012 new year's book cull. reserved for wild release