Plot overview — Never Let Me Go — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Plot overview
Introduction
What you need to know
The whole novel in brief, part by part, from Kathy's opening words as a carer to her last drive, and how her memories move between past and present.
The three parts: Hailsham (Chapters 1 to 9), the Cottages (Chapters 10 to 17), and Kathy's years as a carer (Chapters 18 to 23), all told by Kathy at thirty-one.
Where the truths come out: Miss Lucy's warning in Chapter 7, the first talk of deferrals in Chapter 13, the news that Hailsham has closed in Chapter 18, Ruth's confession in Chapter 19, and Miss Emily's account in Chapter 22.
The moments OCR has printed for comparison: Tommy's art and the bullying (2024), Kathy's visit to Ruth after her second donation (2025) and Miss Emily on the deferrals (2023); and the kinds of moment it has asked students to choose: something unexpected (2023), a character helped by another (2024) and Kathy's time as a carer (2025).
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
