Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I like the blurring of genres and to have a writer as artistic and literary as Ishiguro write about clones is pretty great. The novel—which is in all other ways a work of realism—grounded in place, point of view, and character, made this future seem more possible than a more conventional sci-fi treatment ever would. Actually this isn’t so much a novel about clones as a novel about growing up. And how do you find a way to make a coming-of-age story fresh? Make the kids clones. The reader isn’t supposed to know this fact for a large part of the novel, but reviewers have made it impossible to go into this book with that secret intact. And I suspect most readers would figure it out pretty early anyway. The novel, in the end, devolves into situation over story, and type over character, but for the first half it was wonderfully fresh and terribly sad.