For 20 years this novel has reduced the most hardened critics to tears

Sydney Morning Herald

27-05-2025

For more than a decade, Kazuo Ishiguro had a box file in his study marked 'Students Novel'. In it were notes, diagrams and some pages of a story he'd tried to write in 1990, then again in 1995. Each time he'd abandoned the attempt and had written a completely different novel.
He knew his students would share a strange destiny that would shorten their lives but also make them feel special. But what would that destiny be? Here was where he got stuck. He'd played around with ideas such as a virus or radioactive poisoning, but it all seemed too melodramatic.
In 2001, he returned to his project with fresh ideas. They were inspired partly by new developments in science, and partly by the contact he'd had with a new generation of British writers such as Alex Garland and David Mitchell. While Ishiguro had come of age in an era when literary fiction avoided any whiff of 'popular' genres, the younger writers had no such qualms. They blithely incorporated all sorts of influences from science fiction, fantasy and horror into their work.
'My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me', Ishiguro writes. 'They opened windows for me I'd not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.'
He writes this in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Never Let Me Go, the extraordinary novel that gradually emerged from those early notes. It's the Nobel Prize winner's most-read novel, has sold in millions, is widely studied and has been translated into 50 languages. It's been adapted into a film, two stage plays and a Japanese TV series.
Like many fans, I remember vividly my first reading. It starts so quietly, narrated in simple and artless prose by Kathy, a student at Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school in the English countryside with kind teachers and a nostalgic Enid-Blyton feel. We follow the everyday lives of Kathy and her two schoolfriends, Ruth and Tommy, as they grow into young adults.
Gradually the purpose of the school is revealed. I won't give it away except to say there's a dark future for these idealistic, hopeful kids and their tender feelings for one another.
Talking of tender feelings, this is a novel that reduces the most hardened critics to tears. 'No matter how many times I read it … it breaks my heart all over again,' writes Alix Ohlin in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 'I was nothing less than stunned by it,' David Sexton writes in the New Statesman. He reread it on a day ferry when he was a judge for the 2005 Booker Prize (it nearly won, but the casting vote went to John Banville's The Sea) and was glad he was in a windowless cabin, 'so tearful it made me'.