Reading Groups

Cover to Cover: Never Let Me Go at 20 with Chris Holmes

Thursday, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT August 14, 2025

The Center for Fiction

This single-session group is held in person at The Center for Fiction. Registration includes a complimentary drink from our Café & Bar.

The ‘With Books’ option includes the title required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

When Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro was well known as a writer of beautiful, reserved prose who represented the lives of ordinary people in times of historical crisis. The novel was a shock to the literary system, flirting with science fiction and the speculative novel, while holding fast to Ishiguro’s stylistic mode of veiled emotions and buried affect. The novel would become a bestseller, a finalist for the Booker Prize, and the most-read novel in Ishiguro’s growing canon of books. Taking place at a peculiar boarding school in 1990’s England, Never Let Me Go introduces us to school children who grow, learn, and love in powerful and quite ordinary ways, only to find themselves asked to accept profound limits on their lives as adults in a world that has chosen to see them as other, as non-human, as expendable. We will take up this extraordinary novel as one of the great interrogators of contemporary life.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro in its entirety in advance of the first meeting.

What to expect from this reading group: This is a highly conversational class augmented by informational tidbits about the author and text drawn from the instructor’s book on Ishiguro.

Reading List:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Led by

Chris Holmes

Chris Holmes

Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the creator and host of the literary podcast Burned by Books. He is also the co-producer and host of Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society for Novel Studies. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature is published with Bloomsbury. Since 2011 he has been the co-organizer of the New Voices Literary Festival at Ithaca College. He received his PhD from Brown University.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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