If what moved you in Never Let Me Go was Kathy’s tender caregiving and the fragile hope around myths like the “deferrals,” you’ll feel right at home with Klara’s gentle, observant voice. As an Artificial Friend watching over Josie, Klara makes her own almost-sacred bargains with the world (even believing the Sun might heal), echoing the way Kathy tries to bring meaning to Ruth and Tommy’s fates. It’s the same intimate, humane speculative lens—less about gadgets, more about how love and duty shape who we are.

Hailsham’s polite gentility masking the donors’ future is mirrored chillingly in The Unit. Dorrit Weger enters a pristine, pampering complex where residents create art, fall in love, and then—like Kathy’s friends after their third and fourth “donations”—are called to give themselves away. The soothing corridors, the euphemisms, the cultivated culture all echo the way Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were nurtured even as their destiny closed in.

If Kathy’s reflective voice—sifting through Hailsham memories, Ruth’s manipulations, and what was lost with Tommy—hooked you, Atonement offers a similarly piercing interiority. Briony Tallis looks back on a single, devastating misreading of Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain and beyond, much like Kathy revisits the moment rumors of “deferrals” crumbled. Both novels turn recollection into reckoning, asking what memory can salvage after love is already wounded.

The way Hailsham shapes Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy to accept their future finds a stark parallel in Matt, the clone of the drug lord El Patrón. Raised on the Alacrán estate, Matt is cherished and caged at once—much as the students were curated for Madame’s “Gallery” yet destined for donations. With protectors like Celia and Tam Lin echoing Miss Lucy’s troubled honesty, this is a fierce coming-of-age about finding a self in a world that denies you one.

If the slow revelation of Hailsham’s true purpose—and the heartbreaking collapse of the “deferrals” rumor—gripped you, Offred’s account of Gilead offers a kindred dread. Like Kathy’s first-person witness to a system that turns people into means, Offred navigates ceremonies, whispered rebellions, and stories that may or may not promise escape. Both novels expose how institutions domesticate cruelty, one polite rule at a time.