Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’d made two previous attempts back in the early 1990s to write the novel that became NEVER LET ME GO. It was then called ‘The Students Novel’. Both times I felt there was a key piece missing to the jigsaw, a piece whose shape and color I couldn’t determine, and I’d moved on to work on a different book. The story eluding me, I knew, would feature ‘students’ who lived in wrecked farmhouses in the rainy English countryside. (But there’d be no sign of a college near them.) They’d be a segregated group whose lives had become strangely shortened. I couldn’t progress beyond that. I couldn’t work out why they were ‘doomed’. I considered viruses, played around with nuclear contamination. But none of that seemed to work. The novel I eventually managed to complete owes a lot to a generation of writers fifteen years or so younger than me who emerged in Britain in the late 1990s. My own generation had always been standoff-ish, often downright snobbish, about employing SF or fantasy tropes, but I saw how writers like David Mitchell and Alex Garland were excited and inspired by them, using them brilliantly in books like CLOUD ATLAS or movies like 28 DAYS LATER and SUNSHINE. They opened up my imagination, giving me permission to explore speculative worlds. When I tried a third time, years after the first, to write my ‘Students Novel’, the dystopian sci-fi dimension fell into place quite naturally, and I was at last able to write NLMG. The novel kicked off what I now recognize as a new phase in my writing life – an extended project to which I’m still adding today. My latest novel, KLARA AND THE SUN, though different in crucial respects, is perhaps a kind of response to NLMG, an attempt to answer convincingly what seems to me a pervasive sadness that hangs over the older book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54120408-klara-and-the-sun