Never Let Me Go

Kathy H., now thirty-one and a veteran carer, has spent years looking after fellow clones as they donate their organs, and much of the novel is her memory of growing up at Hailsham, the seemingly idyllic boarding school where she, Ruth, and Tommy were raised. The comforting fictions of childhood erode when guardian Miss Lucy breaks with the school's careful evasions and tells the students plainly that they exist to give up their organs in young adulthood and will never have ordinary lives, careers, or families. Miss Lucy is quietly removed from Hailsham soon after. As teenagers the three move to the Cottages, a halfway house where they mix with slightly older clones and begin to grasp the shape of their futures. There they hear a hopeful rumor that couples who can prove they are truly in love may be granted a deferral of their donations, and on a search for a woman Ruth believes might be her "original," the group travels to Norfolk, though the resemblance turns out to be meaningless.

Tommy, who was mocked at school for his poor art, confides to Kathy his theory that Madame's gallery of student artwork exists to judge whether couples' love is real, and that this is the key to a deferral. Ruth, sensing the growing bond between Kathy and Tommy, cruelly tells Kathy that Tommy would never truly choose her because of her sexual past, and the remark keeps them apart. Kathy leaves to train as a carer, and the three friends drift apart for roughly a decade while Ruth and Tommy proceed toward their donations.

Years later, Kathy learns Ruth's first donation went badly and requests to become her carer. Reunited, Ruth admits with remorse that she deliberately separated Kathy and Tommy, and before she completes (dies) she gives them Madame's address and urges them to pursue a deferral together. Kathy then becomes Tommy's carer, and the two finally become a couple. They travel to see Madame and her old guardian Miss Emily, who now live together, hoping to make the case that their love is real. Instead they learn the truth: deferrals never existed. Hailsham had been an experimental, comparatively humane program meant to prove to a skeptical public that clones possessed souls, using their art as evidence; when public opinion turned against the clones' existence, funding dried up and Hailsham was shut down, with most clones elsewhere raised in far bleaker conditions.

Crushed by this final loss of hope, Tommy grows angry and eventually asks for a different carer, and shortly afterward he completes following his fourth donation. In the novel's closing scene, Kathy drives out to a lonely field in Norfolk, where windblown litter has snagged against a fence, and she stands there imagining that this is the place where everything and everyone she has lost — her childhood, her friends, her whole vanished world — has finally come to rest, before she turns and drives on to wherever she is needed next.