Don't leave me

There's something hypocritical about neat British still lifes...

At Hailsham selective school, everything is seemingly English: in a neat and orderly fashion. And so even the trio of students who have formed a love pact here scrupulously respect that the local educators demand perfect health, artistic talent and loyal performance of unusually named tasks. But far from being an elite Eton, Harrow or Winchester - let alone a wizarding Hogwarts - this rural school is more like a secluded house of horrors. Even with the protective narrator Kathy, the short-tempered Tommy and the rebellious Ruth, the "brave new world" beyond the compound fence is counted on for something unheard of. And the worst part of their fate is that someone else's monstrosity has soaped their stairs - they are not allowed to see the truth of their existence, which they rush confusedly towards, until the author himself pulls back the veil of their innocence...

The casteist mannerisms of boarding school education have provided the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature winner with another great opportunity to undermine the dubious certainties of the island way of life. The suspiciously neat, at times almost spellbinding twist of the tragic story - lurking in all of Ishiguro's novels as a moral test - gives way to an urgent dystopia about a bleak future, lurking perhaps just around the next corner. Or rather, a message about the dismal state of humanity. Man is always and everywhere responsible for those he has created, especially if they are not Frankenstein's monsters.

The novel, shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, is one of the 100 most important prose novels of the last hundred years. In its film adaptation (2010, directed by Mark Romanek), Carey Mulligan and Kiera Knightley took the lead female roles.

"A disturbing novel of crushing power. No one can dispense darkness in small sips like Kazuo Ishiguro." - Entertainment Weekly

"A book that will break your heart, but you won't be able to tear yourself away from it. The pain encapsulated in it grows into incredible tension." - Time Magazine

"An elegy almost charmingly tricky. As usual, the author pulls the reader under the surface." - Newsweek

"Kazuo Ishiguro's novels have the incisiveness of Goya's paintings. The landscape paintings are seemingly (...) neat and the gestures are refined, but the speeches, reflections and actions of the characters reveal that the creator is waiting to see how much his intention touches us." - Right

Maybe it's been whispering in your head since you were five or six: "One day, and it may not be long, you will know what it is like." And so you wait (. ) for that moment when you realize that you are really different from them. That there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you ill, yet they shudder at the mere thought of you - how you were brought into the world and why -, and who are terrified that you could put your hand on their arm. The first time you look at yourself through the eyes of such a person, you shudder. It's as if you pass by a mirror that you pass by every day and it suddenly shows you something else, something disturbing and strange. - excerpt from the text