Never Let Me Go: With GCSE and A Level study guide Kazuo Ishiguro 9780571335770

Designed to meet the requirements for students at GCSE and A level, this accessible educational edition offers the complete text of Never Let Me Go with a comprehensive study guide. Intended for individual study as well as class use, Geoff Barton's guide:

- clearly introduces the context of the novel and its author;
- examines in detail its themes, characters and structure;
- looks at the novel in the author's own words, and at different critical receptions;
- provides glossaries and test questions to prompt deeper thinking.

In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at a seemingly idyllic school, Hailsham, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and came to Britain at the age of five. He is the author of six novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, Corine Internationaler Buchpreis, Serono Literary Prize, Casino de Santiago European Novel Award, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize). Nocturnes (2009) was awarded the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Prize. Kazuo Ishiguro's work has been translated into over forty languages. The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have also been adapted into major films. In 1995 Ishiguro received an OBE for Services to Literature, and in 1998 the French decoration of Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

Geoff Barton has been described as Britain's best known English teacher. A columnist for the TES and a regular speaker on literacy, grammar and education, he is Headteacher of a large comprehensive school, where he still teaches English.