'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro Quiz

Answer: Hailsham

Hailsham is a boarding school in an unnamed area of Britain. Glenmorgan House and the Saunders Trust are similar institutions, while Morningdale is the name of a doctor involved in a scandal centred around creating a race of super-intelligent beings. The children at Hailsham are encouraged to be creative, make art and exchange it at sales.

Answer: Norfolk

When Miss Emily, the headmistress at Hailsham, is teaching the children about the counties of England, she shows them pictures from whichever county she is talking about. The one exception is Norfolk, which Miss Emily refers to as a 'lost corner'. At Hailsham, the children have a Lost Corner where they keep lost property, and several children - Kathy included - joke about Norfolk being the Lost Corner of England, and that all lost items end up there. Funnily enough, Kathy does find something she was looking for in a shop on the Norfolk coast.

Answer: Judy Bridgwater

Judy Bridgwater, unlike the other answers, is a fictional singer. Kathy finds a tape of her songs, 'Songs After Dark', at one of the sales and hides the cover as Judy is holding a cigarette on it, and the guardians are very down on smoking because the children have to keep healthy.

She listens to the tape in her spare time and becomes obsessed with one song, 'Never Let Me Go'. She imagines it to be about a woman who has always wanted to have a baby, and when she finally has one, she sings the song to it.

Answer: She cries.

One afternoon, Kathy puts 'Never Let Me Go' on and dances to it while holding a pillow and pretending it is a baby. Madame, one of the teachers, walks past and sees Kathy, and cries. Kathy is confused and does not understand why Madame is crying, until many years later; Kathy had thought that Madame knew what the song was about and thought it was sad.

However, the truth is very different: Madame was crying because she saw Kathy as a little girl clinging to the 'old, kind world' and begging it not to let her go.

Answer: To donate their vital organs when they are older

Miss Lucy tells the boys that they will never have a career because once they are older, they will begin to donate their vital organs, and that they were specifically created for this; the children are, in fact, clones (which is why none of them have surnames, just a letter). She is later fired by Hailsham because of this. She wanted to be more honest with the children about their futures, but Miss Emily's argument is that if the children knew what lay ahead, they would see creating things as pointless.

Kathy notes that none of the children are particularly surprised, as hints have been dropped over time about them donating their organs, hence the need for them to have constant health checks. Some children even joke about coming unzipped. They are also aware that they are infertile, although they do have sex education.

Answer: The Cottages

Some Hailsham students go to the White Mansion in Wales or Poplar Farm in Dorset, but Kathy, Tommy and Ruth go to the Cottages, an old farm converted into living quarters. It is here that Kathy starts experimenting with sex, and discovers that she has a high sex drive.

She looks through pornographic magazines because she wonders if she was cloned from a porn star. Tommy and Ruth are a couple, and several other students also pair off. They copy the behaviour of couples they see on television.

Answer: In an office

Chrissie and Rodney, one of the older couples living at the Cottages, go to Cromer in Norfolk and see a woman working in an office who they think looks like Ruth. Ruth becomes interested in both the idea of working in an office and finding her 'possible', the woman from whom she might have been cloned.

Chrissie, Rodney, Tommy, Ruth and Kathy go to Cromer for a day out. They find the 'possible' and follow her into an art gallery, but it turns out to be a false alarm and the woman doesn't even look that much like Ruth. Ruth is angry and says that the clones would never have been created from a person like that and were more likely to have been created from 'trash'. The group split up and Tommy and Kathy go for a walk, and they find a Judy Bridgwater tape in a charity shop, the same album Kathy once had.

Answer: False

Tommy, Ruth and Kathy hear a rumour that a couple can put off their organ donations for a period if they can prove that they are really in love with each other. Tommy starts drawing weird creatures in the hope that Madame will put them in her gallery, and take his art as evidence of what is in his soul, as he remembers Miss Lucy mentioning something about 'evidence'.

Kathy later becomes a carer, while Ruth and Tommy begin their donations. Ruth is ill as a result of her first donation, and she, Tommy and Kathy meet up and see a boat together. Ruth confesses that she tried to keep Tommy and Kathy apart, and gives them Madame's address so Kathy and Tommy can try and get a deferral together.

After Ruth's death, Kathy becomes Tommy's carer and the two of them track Madame and Miss Emily down. They ask about the deferral rumour but unfortunately, it turns out to be false; there were never any deferrals.

Answer: To prove they have souls

Tommy's theory that the children were encouraged to make art to show what their souls were like is close to the truth: they were encouraged to be creative to prove that they had souls at all. Madame and Miss Emily still have some of the art in their house, and Miss Emily explains why Hailsham was set up, to be more humane than other institutions where clones were raised. Unfortunately, the experiment worked a little too well; people did not like being reminded of where their organs came from and, coupled with the Morningdale scandal, this caused Hailsham and similar institutions to lose their financial backing.

Hailsham had closed several years earlier, and both Madame and Miss Emily were left in debt. They are moving furniture when Tommy and Kathy come to visit. Miss Emily remembers both children and is adamant that Hailsham gave them a good life; earlier in the book, Kathy notes that donors she cared for who did not come from Hailsham did not like to talk about where they were raised, and it is implied that children are raised to become donors in much more inhumane environments. After Tommy and Kathy leave, Tommy gets out of the car and screams in anger.

Answer: No

Kathy is the sole survivor of the group, and even she is living on borrowed time as a carer who will one day have to become a donor. Tommy dies, or 'completes', after his fourth donation; although Kathy had stayed with him as a carer, he eventually requests another carer as he does not want Kathy to see him at his worst. Both he and Kathy are glad that Ruth died not knowing the truth about the deferrals, because she wanted the best for them. Kathy and Tommy part ways and after she finds out about his death, she drives to Norfolk for old times' sake.