Recommended Reading: 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro

Though the revelation at the heart of this incredible novel comes very early in the story, I'll warn you that after this paragraph there will 'spoilers' of sorts.  So as a general review I'll just say that it's a chilling, methodical, and beautifully anguished work that charts the short lives of a group of friends who attend a special school in an alternate-reality England.  What makes this school and these friends so 'special' is said below, along with why their teachers and those outside the campus are so afraid of them.  But know that this is a science fiction work in the most literary sense, with complex technological and emotional themes intertwined in order to explore some disturbing aspects of a potential future.  Hopefully that's enough to get you to a book store of Amazon or wherever you need to go.

Like I said, the 'big reveal' comes early and the surprise isn't necessary to the overall reading experience, so here it is.  The kids at this school are clones.  And they've been cloned in order to their harvest their organs, and in all likelihood the process will kill them before they're thirty.  The three friends at the center of the novel, including the wonderfully voiced female narrator, are aware of this future very early.  The nature of their particular existence and the reason they've been put up in such a fancy school are details best left unsaid here, but the powerful strength of the novel lies in its ability to communicate buried anguish, to paint a portrait of doomed souls whose acceptance of their fate requires a quiet and shattering emotional strength all its own.  

Ishiguro's style is very 'English', as anyone who has read his Booker-winning 'Remains of the Day' surely knows.  His prose can be at once lyrical and droll, and he's never in a hurry to push his narratives along at a brisk pace.  But for the kind of stories he tells, especially this one, it's perfect.  He carefully unwraps the layers of this tale, and every layer is more distressing and charged, both emotionally and intellectually.  He leaves the greater quandaries of the cloning debate and all its ramifications to the reader.  His interests lie with these people; their relationships, their fears, and their search for meaning in their relatively short lives that jives with our own distraught searches.  It's a jarring, affecting, and devastating work from one of the best writers out there.  Whether you like science fiction or not, give this one a look.

Note: A film adaptation is currently in the works and it's slated for release in 2010.  It features Kiera Knightly as one of the three friends and it's being directed by Mark Romanek.  It's a major leap for the director and it remains to be seen if he can pull it off.  Romanek's only major previous film is 'One Hour Photo',  a solid film that flashed some skill at gradual pacing and understated horror, but he's never tackled anything as complex and thematically risky as this.  However, the screenplay is supposedly a slam dunk and was listed as one of England's 10 best unproduced scripts by Vanity Fair.