Audiobook Download Information
- Edition:
- Unabridged (Random House Audio)
- Length:
- 9 hours, 40 minutes
- File Size:
- 265 MB (8 files)
- Published:
- April 2005
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Review by Dewi L. Faulkner, eMusic
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go chronicles the lives of a group of isolated children raised in a bucolic countryside boarding school in late 20th-century dystopian Britain. This sweeping work by the author of The Remains of the Day was shortlisted for the famed Booker prize in 2005 and listed in Time magazine’s list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels since 1923.
When I began listening to Never Let Me Go, I was immediately struck by the first couple lines of narration in the story: “My name is Kathy H. I’m 31 years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over 11 years.” The voice of the narrator, British actress Rosalyn Landor, seemed much too old and sophisticated to be believable as an average woman in her early 30s.
But Kathy H. is no average woman, and Never Let Me Go is no average story. And as I continued to take in the tragic tale of Kathy H. and her friends Ruth and Tommy, I soon realized that only a voice as haunting and powerfully melancholic as Landor’s could do justice to Ishiguro’s masterpiece.
Quotes from the Critics
"[D]isturbingly eloquent....That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill's superb play A NUMBER and Margaret Atwood's celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power. A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy." - Kirkus
"Done with great delicacy and panache...." - Literary Review
"Kathy tells her story in (the novel says) 'England, late 1990s,' so the book seems to belong to the same genre as Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, counterfactual historical fiction....The strangeness...is ingeniously evoked--by means of literal-minded accounts of things that don't quite add up--and teasing out the hidden story is the main pleasure of the book." - New Yorker
"NEVER LET ME GO is like [THE REMAINS OF THE DAY] insofar as it's about the way people will accept their lot in life even though it may be self-destructive....What begins as a mystery with futuristic undertones ends up an engrossing meditation on the here and now. As always, Ishiguro pulls you under, even as you convince yourself that you're just going wading." - Newsweek
"NEVER LET ME GO is unlikely to be everybody's cup of tea. The people in it aren't heroic. The ending is not comforting. Nevertheless, this is a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a glass, darkly." - Slate
"The setup is so shocking--in such a potentially dime-store-novel way--that it's hard to believe at first that it issued from Ishiguro's desktop. Has one of our subtlest observers gone to pulp? The novel is the starkest instance yet of the paradox that has run through all Ishiguro's work. Here is a writer who takes enormous gambles, then uses his superior gifts to manage the risk as tightly as possible....[I]f the novel feels a bit too distant to move us to outright heartbreak, it delivers images of odd beauty and a mounting existential distress that hangs around long after we've read it." - New York Times Book Review
"...Ishiguro serves up the saddest, most persuasive science fiction you'll read. Set in 'England, late 1990s,' the novel posits a technological breakthrough whose effect is to condemn the children of Hailsham to a fate that was, until this novel, unthinkable. Ishiguro's imagining of the children's misshapen little world is profoundly thoughtful, and their hesitant progression into knowledge of their plight is an extreme and heartbreaking version of the exodus of all children from the innocent in which the benevolent but fraudulent adult world conspires to place them." - Atlantic Monthly
"If Ishiguro is a writer of uncommon restraint, he is also a writer who has increasingly made demands of his readers. Despite Kathy's easy and engaging narrative voice, this is true, too, of NEVER LET ME GO: A reader's patience and humility are called for. Kathy H. is an ordinary young woman to whom circumstances have dealt an appalling fate; the ultimate emotional resonance of the book stems, at least in part, from that necessary ordinariness. And those who listen to her story will find themselves amply rewarded by this ambitious, peculiar and deeply affecting book." - Nation
"[A] superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled novel...." - Entertainment Weekly
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