The back of this book proclaims that “Kazuo Ishiguro has been acclaimed in the Sunday Times for ‘extending the possibilities of fiction.’ In Never Let Me Go he has fashioned another remarkable story – a story of love, loss and hidden truths – that takes its place among his finest work.”

Usually I’d consider ‘extending the possibilities of fiction’ to be a nugget of boring PR-speak, the sort of thing you see on the back of dreary novels about broken families who eat their way around the globe while translating David Bowie into Cornish: the sort of books that should, by all accounts, be interesting, but instead spend so much time trying to be quirky that they fall as flat as a gluten-free pancake.

Kazuo Ishiguro really does stretch the boundaries of fiction. His work is sometimes surreal and it often features a somewhat bleak, science-fiction type future, but I wouldn’t call him a science fiction author (his science is integrated wonderfully into the narrative, by the way: he doesn’t fall prey to the “info-dump” type storytelling that even some very good science fiction authors love [I wrote a post on the info dump here]).

I won’t tell you enough of the plot of this one to spoil you, but it’s set in a slightly dystopic version of our own times, much like Ishiguro’s other work. It’s almost as if he’s a depressed, less flippant Nick Horby, and all I mean by that is that there’s a sort of inherent Englishness to his work, not quite stiff-upper-lip but almost there. Kathy, the narrator, reminisces about her childhood at a strange, idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. Who is Kathy? Who are her friends?

The lack of info-dumping becomes important here: the book has a soylent greenish subtlety to horror that brings you slowly to an uncomfortable realisation about just how skewed this version of modern Britain is.

I’m glad Ishiguro hasn’t been pigeon-holed as a “genre” author. I recommend this book even if you don’t enjoy science fiction. It’s a very sad book, with very real insights and beautiful, elegiac storytelling.

- Agnes.