There is a cassette tape at the center of this book, and it is the thing that undoes me. Kathy, the narrator, has an old tape by an obscure singer, Judy Bridgewater, and one song on it: "Never Let Me Go." As she dances to the music and sings along, she is small and alone in her dorm. A girl dancing with a pillow, holding it and imagining it was a baby.

And then she turns. Upon opening her eyes, she sees Madame watching her and crying. For most of the book, you carry the wrong idea about why that woman weeps, and when the truth of it finally arrives, it is quiet devastation.

I went and looked later, and Judy Bridgewater's song is (sort of) real. I sat in my kitchen listening to a song that doesn't exist, about people who don't exist.

What Ishiguro does that I find almost unbearable is that he never hides it. From the beginning you know what the fate of the characters is going to be, but you hope until almost the end that there may be something different.

Beautiful yet sad, it is a story of peculiar beings struggling to live their lives as normally and ordinarily as possible, in spite of their bleak futures. There are strange, tender details that only a few people talk about but that lodged themselves in me.

Ishiguro ends Chapter Eleven with one character, Tommy, discovering our protagonist, Kathy, leafing through some pornographic magazines. I love the explanation for why Kathy is intrigued by the old porno mags. It is Kathy's quest throughout the magazines to find her Possible, and the reason, once you understand it, is one of the saddest things in the book.

Or Ruth. She even imagined herself working in an office, an open-plan one, built from nothing but a sales catalogue found in the mud.

And the school itself. There are talks about ghosts, and the fact that Hailsham offered a view of the dark woods makes matters even more chilling.

By the end, they understand what lies ahead. No one ever truly rebels against this; it's just the way it is. Hardly any of them rail against their fate. They simply accept it meekly.

And yet, despite the cruelty and hopelessness in their lives, Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth can live meaningful lives through their relationships with each other.

I read this in two sittings and I cried at the end. Six years later, this one still haunts me.

That cassette. That slow dance with the pillow.

I am not over it, and I read it years ago.