Never Let Me Go is half sci-fi and half not. Science fiction and literature are not, of course, mutually exclusive, so I don't mean to suggest that it's the quality of the writing that distinguishes it from the genre, it's more a split in the focus of the story. The book is concerned with three former students of Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school in the English countryside. In the first part of the story the narrator Kathy H. recalls her life there and the intricate ties binding her to Ruth and Tommy. The book makes no mystery of the fact that the students will become organ "donors" once they reach adulthood (after a couple of years as "carers," health aides of a sort, for other donors), making as many as four donations before "completing." The suspense, rather, comes from the slowly-doled out details of how this all works, and the students' dawning realization of just what it is life has in store for them. This slowness in the development of the plot (indeed, in a relative lack of plot) and the painstaking attention to the emotional adjustments Kathy and her friends make in order to cope with what has been pre-ordained is what makes Never Let Me Godifferent from most science fiction, even great exemplars of the genre.

In fact Never Let Me Go reminded me most of another recent book about boarding school life, Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. Both books are concerned with the minutiae of adolescent interaction, the way that power is established through clever moves, and can shift just as suddenly away because of small errors of judgment or gamesmanship. Manipulation is to be used strategically, but so is sincerity. To what end is somewhat fuzzy, even to the students themselves - credibility within the group remains the highest goal.

What is both disturbing and fascinating for the reader is how utterly ordinary these characters are. Like Sittenfeld's narrator, Ishiguro's Kathy, and indeed Tommy and Ruth, are all rather boring. One blurb described Ruth as the ringleader and Tommy as the star athlete with a temper problem. These descriptions are nominally true but the trio is much tamer, and above all, more passive than what they suggest. And yet though the students are ordinary and infuriatingly lacking in any boldness (a sine qua non for most literary protagonists), this passivity is precisely what slows everything down in order to let the reader come closer and experience along with the characters, all their tiny swerves of joy and fear, their inching towards intimacy, with a breathtaking clarity.

While Sittenfeld's novel ended with graduation, Ishiguro follows his protagonists as they leave Hilsham and, in the book's second part, try to create lives for themselves outside of its confines. They know that within a few years they will take on their roles, first as carers and eventually as donors. This fact looms over their lives but vaguely, pushed to the background Ð it is a fact long-known and half-embarrassing. In the meantime they play, have sex, fantasize about regular lives. The idea of working in an office fills them with unspeakable wonder, making beautiful what the reader takes utterly for granted but for these kids is out of reach. When the characters do take action, to contest - or at least delay - their fates, the reader can appreciate what tremendous force and courage this must take, in the face of life-long conformity and institutionalized inertia. Perhaps it is because of the characters' very ordinariness that these developments take on a particular poignancy. What is horrifying about their story is not just the program of cloning or the forced "donation" of body parts, but the loss of what is commonplace: freedom, yes, but also what it leads to Ð choices that flower; relationships that ebb and flow; lives that develop, over time. Ishiguro has created a futuristic nightmare, but also a portrait of the mundane in all its precious and extraordinary beauty.