Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)Read about the other books on the list.
The most popular novel by our most recent Nobel Laureate in literature (though I’d argue The Remains of the Day is still his best) was much acclaimed and much purchased when it was published in 2005, though it seems critics are still arguing over whether it’s dystopian sci-fi or coming-of-age or a complex metaphor about race or horror or literary fiction of the highest caliber (the answer being, of course, all of these, and a hearty duh to you). Rachel Cusk reads the novel as being as much about art itself as it is about...[read on]
Never Let Me Go is on Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.
--Marshal Zeringue