The characters in Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro aren’t machines, they’re human. But they aren’t treated the same as you or I. This book is set in the English countryside in the 1990s. The book begins shrouded in mystery. The main character Kathy is called a “carer”.  A carer for donors, is a special job in this bazaar alternate reality.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn about Kathy’s childhood in a secretive school called Hailsham. Kathy reconnects with her friends after they leave the school, but not everything is as it seems.

It isn’t until the end of the book that the mystery of the “donations” is unraveled, and the reader will find out what it truly means for Kathy and her friends when they become donors themselves. 

My favorite excerpt from this book is, “Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?”

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading sci-fi or dystopian fiction. I would give this novel an overall 10/10 for the original theme for the plot, and how the author makes us think about what it means to be human, and for the execution of how this theme was carried throughout the novel.