Never Let Me Go

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Book Cover and Illustrations.

Programs Used: Illustrator, Photoshop.

Book cover design and series of imagery in response to one of my favourite books Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I divided this project up into themes. When reading through Never Let Me Go one of the key themes that stood out for me was the theme of loss. When the characters said that Norfolk is like a "lost corner" and that "all lost things end up in Norfolk" I liked this idea as it paralleled with the characters being lost souls, the loss of their childhood, being secluded from society and losing their friends to the donor program. So I began to travel around Norfolk looking for “lost corners” and then at my own home in response to researching the house in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Reading this book made me think about the home and how the characters in Never Let Me Go often look back fondly on their memories of Hailsham School as their home to forget about their current situation. Bachelard spoke about “the isolated house symbolising solitude” and how the house is “our corner of the world” and “our first universe”. So I then began to play around with this idea of the corner of a room and the house being our first world, playing with the scale of the Hailsham house and the idea of using the miniature to symbolise childhood and nostalgia. I used this idea of a house within a house to create tension and a sense of strangeness which is present throughout the book. I used muted, pale colours and the transparency of watercolours to convey the themes of loss and nostalgia.

Book Cover Design

The School the students lived in is represented as a dollhouse and the typography is drawn using a crayon to covey the themes of childhood and nostalgia. The Typography gradually fades away which alludes to the student's eventual fate.