Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is a 2005 science fiction/romance/drama novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day. The plot concerns three friends, Kathy, who narrates, Tommy and Ruth, who as children are students of Hailsham, an unusual boarding school in the isolated English countryside. As Kathy nears adulthood, the truth about Hailsham and its students is gradually revealed to the reader.

A movie adaptation was released in 2010 starring Carey Mulligan as Kathy, Keira Knightley as Ruth, and Andrew Garfield as Tommy.


 * Activist Fundamentalist Antics: Inverted - no matter how horrible things get, no one ever shows any outrage against the system. Two of the three protagonists have emotional outbursts of dissaproval and almost hate, but always aiming at themselves.
 * Alternate History
 * Boarding School
 * Conditioned to Accept Horror: Not stated outright for some time, but a Genre Savvy reader is going to have a tough time shaking the feeling that something awful is behind the students of Hailsham.
 * Crapsack World: A world where  is the norm scores fairly high on the crapsack meter.
 * Creative Sterility:.
 * Creating Life Is Awesome:
 * Cure for Cancer:
 * Dying Alone: Ruth's greatest fear in the first parts of the story.
 * Extranormal Institute
 * Fantastic Aesop: If you interpret the story as purely literal rather than Rule of Symbolism, it all boils down to
 * Free-Love Future: Since the students, sex isn't a taboo for them and everyone is pretty open about it.
 * I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Ruth, in the later parts of the story.
 * Inconvenient Hippocratic Oath: Creepily averted. In the film version, the hospitals are always shown slowly and deliberately murdering people. Obviously the "And I shall do no harm" code only applies to certain patients. And the worst part is the constant undercurrent of humiliation and shame as the victims are so clearly and ultimately shown that they are considered to be without real human value.
 * Internalized Categorism: The perhaps most painful aspect of the story is that the characters never overcome their social conditioning.
 * Life Will Kill You: The film version ends with the protagonist thinking about how ordinary people are Not So Different after all, how we are all living our lives on death row.
 * Monochrome Casting.
 * Never Trust a Trailer: Many TV advertisements for the film version made it look like your typical romantic drama. Nope, no science fiction or  in this movie...
 * One-Letter Name: Their surnames are only a letter. Part of how the system tries to dehumanise them.
 * Orphanage of Love: Hailsham doubles as this, since all its students are orphans.
 * Powered by a Forsaken Child: Oh, this great system, saving so many lives...
 * Questionable Consent: The protagonists and others are getting exploited in the most brutal way, and they have all been conditioned to unquestioningly accept the system.
 * Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
 * Sugary Malice: Ruth has a bit of this, fueled by her fear of being left alone. Far worse, however, is the clinical kindness that the system shows its victims while pushing them down into despair and death.
 * Totalitarian Utilitarian: The system, saving so many lives. Also the protagonists themselves, conditioned to disregard life and dignity for the greater good...
 * Tragic Dream:.
 * Triang Relations: Elements of type four.
 * Trailers Always Spoil: And how. Just about everything that's spoiler sensitive on this page is all but explicitly revealed in the trailer for the upcoming film.
 * Twenty Minutes Into the Future
 * Viewers are Morons: Not exactly, but test audiences for The Movie were so confused about when the film takes place (a very isolated area a la  ? An alternate universe?) that they didn't pay attention to the characters' relationships or the ending. To fix this, a title card was added (with the author's approval) at the beginning puts the film in.
 * Would Be Rude to Say Genocide: People "are completed" on an industrial scale.
 * Viewers are Morons: Not exactly, but test audiences for The Movie were so confused about when the film takes place (a very isolated area a la  ? An alternate universe?) that they didn't pay attention to the characters' relationships or the ending. To fix this, a title card was added (with the author's approval) at the beginning puts the film in.
 * Would Be Rude to Say Genocide: People "are completed" on an industrial scale.
 * Would Be Rude to Say Genocide: People "are completed" on an industrial scale.
 * Would Be Rude to Say Genocide: People "are completed" on an industrial scale.