Faber & Faber Never Let Me Go: With GCSE and A Level study guide

ok

I bought this for my daughter as it’s required reading for her GCSE and she’s very happy with it. She’s finding the educational supplement very helpful. Great buy

Brilliant but disturbing. This novel, written in three parts, is narrated by Kathy, one of the clones, as she looks back over her life just before she is about to become a Donor, recalling memories of her childhood at Hailsham, her late adolescence at the Cottages, (ironically cosy name for a dark, uncaring, dilapidated establishment), and her lonely existence as a Carer. The book examines life, love, friendship and sexuality, what makes us human, how we cope with the prospect of death in a post religious world where the idea of God and an after life no longer exist. It also provides much food for thought - man's inhumanity to man, our treatment of people who are different, our terrible power to exert control over others. I'm still unsure that I could say I enjoyed the novel: it is immensely sad, poignant, thought provoking, memorable, certainly. Sometimes I felt it was unnecessarily long, and would have had more impact if some sections had been condensed. The other members of my book group hated it, I was the only one to say it had any merit at all, and I just could not agree with their views. I'm so pleased I read it. I especially liked the section about the abandoned boat, which Kathy, Ruth and Tommy visit towards the end of the book, causing them to revisit memories of their early years. I thought this boat symbolised the old more natural gentler order of things, especially Hailsham, now abandoned as a Home for young clones in favour of more stark , harsher, less expensive places. Tommy's scream, right at the end, his raging against his impotence to change his fate, also reminds us of our own impotence to escape the inevitable, and perhaps our regrets that we have not managed to fulfil our hopes and dreams. Readers have criticised the clones failure to rebel, to run away, that they are too accepting of the roles society has forced on them. But fundamentally there is no escape for any of us. We live our lives according to our circumstances, we have some choices, but in the end we all face the same fate.