I really should have limited myself to just naming a book and moving on! One name, one image; job done! Instead, no, I decide I’m going to chat and talk about them! I do find it hard not to chat about books. That’s the problem! So now, if I do one a day every day, I’ll finish this on Boxing Day!
Darn it!
Anyway, on with today’s challenge:
A book that makes you cry sad tears.
Sad tears. As opposed to happy tears back on Day Ten.
There are some powerful and bleak books that I’ve read. The Road by Cormac McCarthy stands out as one of those! Oh so bleak! Beautifully written but bleak. It didn’t make me cry sad tears though: the whole scenario was so appalling that I perhaps was too shocked and appalled throughout!
Another couple of options I considered were books I had already mentioned here: how can a book break your heart and not make you cry sad tears, after all? So, Patrick’s Ness’ A Monster Calls definitely fulfills the criteria. Similarly, Emma Donoghue’s Room made me cry sad tears as well as happy ones.
However, my nomination would go to the haunting and powerful and beautiful Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Golly does he make you root for his characters!
The top ten bestseller from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day
Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeAmazon
In one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
That doesn’t reveal much, does it?
Yes, the opening section is slow and a little confusing but bear with it because the dawning realisation of what Kathy and her classmates are – walking, breathing containers for transplant organs, clones ready to be harvested from and, ultimately sacrificed – is so acutely painful! Friendships and loves that come and go and are re-formed. People who believe themselves to be people but who are treated as nothing more than the value of the organs inside them and the slow creep of realisation, which comes to the reader as slowly as to Kathy, is achingly inevitable.
The Book Lovers' Sanctuary 