The Really Popular Book Club is the reading group hosted by Cambridge University Libraries. Everyone is invited to join them and their special guests to discuss a really popular book, one that we all know and perhaps or perhaps not love.

This October, The University Library's Really Popular Book Club will discuss Kazuo Ishiguro's provocative and unsettling novel Never Let Me Go, which tells the story of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, who grow up in an idyllic rural boarding school before being forced to confront the harrowing reality of their future. Much acclaimed, the novel was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize and the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award, before being made into a 2010 film starring Kiera Knightly, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield.

Their special guest for this event will be Mark Wormald, Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Pembroke College. He has written and published widely on the fiction and poetry of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from George Eliot and Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro, and from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Ted Hughes. Mark’s book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes was published in April. Kazuo Ishiguro is one of several leading authors to have contributed to an ongoing series of Masterclasses in Writing at Pembroke, which Mark hosts. 

As well as hearing from Mark about his thoughts and observations on Never Let Me Go, we will once again be opening the floor up to you, our club members, to share your own observations and remarks. To get you thinking and to help prepare any comments or questions you might want to share, we have prepared three starter questions: 

1. Is the book science fiction?
2. How English is this book?
3. What do we make of Cathy as a narrator?

Further information about The Really Popular Book Club, including our FAQs, can be found here.