Ishiguro's bleak house

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber & Faber, €14.

There is a short section in The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's terrifying dystopian novel, in which the narrator reflects on the years before she and her peers were straitjacketed by totalitarianism.

“We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print,” she says. “We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

In a similar way, the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro ...