Most of 'Never Let Me Go' tracks the evolving relationship of these three as they move through Hailsham and then out into the world, but their teenage passions and enthusiasms are increasingly shadowed by the larger question of their destiny - theirs and those of every other Hailsham student. He's the school's star athlete, but is so hot-tempered and childlike in manner that the other boys torment him until Ruth and Kathy adopt him and groom him to be more socially presentable. Ruth is the domineering alpha-female type she recruits Kathy to a secret society when they're about 8 - and later expels her - and always has to have the last word on every subject, from chess to sex to the fiction of George Eliot (even if she can't play chess, is a virgin, and hasn't read 'Daniel Deronda'). These characters are so convincingly rendered, and the incestuous, quasi-Gothic atmosphere of Hailsham so lovingly captured, that 'Never Let Me Go' would still make a compelling read if that was all there was to the story. Kathy is now an adult of 31, recalling her Hailsham years and her two best friends, Ruth and Tommy, who were the other two legs of an unstable teenage romantic triangle. (One also thinks of Margaret Atwood, Denis Johnson and Robert Stone.) 'Never Let Me Go' is a work of meticulous, pitch-perfect writing, but it's also an obsessive page turner that kept me up almost till dawn and left me feeling emotionally shattered. True, his books aren't exactly lighter-than-air confections and his endings tend toward the mercilessly downbeat, but he's one of the few literary authors with the storytelling chops of popular fiction. Ishiguro, the Japanese-born British author of 'The Remains of the Day,' 'An Artist of the Floating World' and several other novels, has a reputation as a difficult and serious writer that isn't doing him any favors. It's a shame to give much of this novel away, but it's even more of a shame not to entice you into reading it. Once you've got that fact in your grasp, the wrenching and suspenseful skein of 'Never Let Me Go' begins to unfold before you.

Like the other students at Hailsham, a peculiar boarding school somewhere in the English countryside - Kathy doesn't quite know where - she just has a first name followed by an initial. It's not an arch literary device, and Kathy isn't hiding anything.

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly about Kathy H., the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's devastating new novel, 'Never Let Me Go,' is that that's really her name.

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