Spooky. Kids in a residential British school called Hailsham are raised to be donors. Their days are filled with what you would expect: studying, confidential discussions among friends, bullies, first loves, rules and rule breaking, secrets after dark, favorite and despised teachers (called guardians), and the slow dawning of adulthood and the ensuing responsibilities.
The world is seen through the eyes of Ruth and her two best friends Tommy and Kathy. Ruth recounts her memories from their earliest days in grade school through their adult years as full-fledged donors. We learn, as Ruth and her peers slowly learn, what it means to be a donor.
I spent most of the book certain that the book was an allegory. Perhaps it was a story of how we are all trained by guardians to donate our lives to a Neo-economic system that saps our bodies as well as our souls. Or, maybe Never Let Me Go is an indictment of factory farmed animals. Or, just maybe, it is really just a very eery story about kids who don’t fit in with the rest of society and whose lives culminate in mandatory donations. Ishiguro is a Nobel prize winner in literature and his characters are perfectly rendered. His meanings, however, are by his own description, left to the reader.