My name is Kathy H. I'm 31 years old, and I've been a carer now for over 11 years.

That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months until the end of this year.

That'll make it almost exactly 12 years.

Now, I know my being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at what I do.

There are some really good carers who've been told to stop after just two or three years.

And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of

14 years, despite being a complete waste of space. So I'm not trying to boast. But then I do know for a

fact that they've been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended

to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have

been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as agitated, even before fourth

donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. So, hello Dominic, hello everybody. That was our narrator, Kathy H, kicking us off in Kizuuueguro's novel,

Never Let Me Go, published in 2005.

And you can tell from that opening reading alone that Kathy, as our narrator, has a very distinctive voice, oddly banal. It's very specific. It's very

hundrum. It's almost conspicuously dull. But it's also quite strange and haunting, because she

references all sorts of quite kind of drastic or atypical procedures or words in a very typical way,

kind of almost conversationally. And you can tell from that

reading alone that she's remembering things. She's drawing on the past. Yeah, it's a, so this is

one of my favourite books. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. This whole story is her

looking back on the past, as you say, Tabby never let me go um kathy is a carer

which we know from the beginning she's a carer and she's remembering her life isn't she with her school

friends ruth and tommy and basically this is a book that um falls into three parts so first of all

she's remembering uh their lives together,

...