Ishiguro on his “Campus Novel”

The Guardian’s Tim Adams talks to Kazuo Ishiguro about his latest novel, Never Let Me Go.

Kathy herself first surfaced in Ishiguro’s notes almost 15 years ago when he had a sense of a book about a group of young people with a Seventies atmosphere. ‘They hung around and argued about books,’ he says. ‘I knew there was this strange fate hanging over them, but I couldn’t work out exactly what it was.’ He used to tell his wife Lorna he was writing a campus novel and she was suitably horrified by the idea. It was only relatively recently, when he was listening on the radio to various programmes about biotechnology, that the particular fate of his sketchy students became clear to him.

Warning: Article contains a couple of spoilers.