Never Let Me Go Books In Print, Audio Books.|
Never Let Me Go buy bestselling books in print, audio books |
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List Price: $39.95 Our Price: $27.57 You Save: $12.38 Features • Audiobook • Unabridged |
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Never Let Me Go description All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own. Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | DISTURBING EVEN IF SLOW PACED |
| Tale follows three students at boarding school who are a few years before puberty and are trying to figure out why they are never allowed to leave the grounds. There's a lot of focus on the prosaic lifestyle/setting of boarding schools, so, if you can't stomach it, you probably won't finish the book.
The kicker, as detailed already by lots of commentators, is that these children are really being home grown as clones in which they will, when they reach maturity, give their body parts so that real people, as they are defined, will live longer. From birth they are taught this is a noble thing and it only boils down to how many body parts they can give before they die and there are even names for continuing states of giving body parts. The idea isn't too far out there as far as sci fi ideas go, though, this is marketed as mainstream fiction. We've been cloning animals with some success and today there are people who buy body parts from each other. Let's not forget the kidney thing in China, the paper issue of someone in NYC buying a liver from some poor person in South America and there's also some evidence of a Middle Eastern prince who flies around in his jet and has a 25 year old kid who will give his heart to this prince if said prince has heart problems and needs a new heart. All said, unless you like the author's writing style, it may not be worth it to continue. Most people reading this to the end in my book club found it creepy and it is. Most of us would be horrified by reading this but think about this: most of us buy from Walmart which is known to pretty much use slave labor people in other countries and most of us don't stop to think about it or care. So, who's to say people may find clones to have no souls and not be real people and therefore justify using their body parts so that "real" people can live far longer, as in the book? |
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