Never Let Me Go Recommendation

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is perfect for you if you are an science fiction reader looking to branch out into more conventional stories. It is still a sci-fi, but not the kind that builds a story around a question such as “How can a great galactical empire collapse?” or “How would/should humanity react to the invention of intelligent robots?”. Ishiguro doesn’t rely on exposition to explain the world or what is special about it. There is no reader surrogate who can ask the necessary questions or a narrator that explains what is needed. Instead he just tells the story through the perspective of a person living in that world, never explicitly explaining how the world works because that is common knowledge there. Hailsham, the orphanage that the main character grows up at and the setting for a majority of the book, seems very normal. It might as well exist in our world, but as the story progresses we begin to understand how it is different by reading between the lines. By the time the big explanation is given by one of the teachers both we the readers and the main character have already figured out the broad picture, it is merely a confirmation, a crystallization of what we already knew.

So what does Ishiguro do with all the space he has created by not doing exposition, world building or any other typical sci-fi stuff? Well, he tells a beautiful, melancholic and sad story about the kids growing up at Hailsham. Normally such a story would have been an uninteresting read for me, but the way he expertly interweaves strands of information about Hailsham with the rest of the story piqued my interest and made the moment-to-moment reading experience very enjoyable. In this way he lured me, someone who have primarily only read science fiction and fantasy, into reading and enjoying a mature romance story.