Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo IshiguroRead about another entry on the list.
Conceptual spoilers for a decade-old novel to follow: Ishiguro’s somber, thoughtful novel centers on a messy future where clones are raised in special school where they are trained to accept their fates as organ farms for the “real” citizens they were bred to serve. The idea of growing replacement organs seems to be creeping closer and closer to a reality, but Ishiguro’s conception of a future where we treat human beings—clones, yes, but obviously sentient and capable of emotional connections and self-awareness—like cattle becomes more chilling and sinister every time you return to it. The book forces you to ask yourself—if you needed a heart and someone had been grown in a vat specifically to provide it, would you hesitate?
Never Let Me Go is on Jeff Somers's lists of "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.
--Marshal Zeringue
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