The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (Book 1) – Our Review

Imagine a world where every thought is out in the open.

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown, a remote settlement on a distant planet that bears an uncanny resemblance to Earth. In just one month he’ll turn fourteen and become a man, though no one will tell him what that truly means. His friends have all undergone the town’s unsettling rite of passage and now keep their distance, leaving only his fiercely loyal dog, Manchee, for company.

Life in Prentisstown is unlike anywhere else. Every man’s thoughts are broadcast constantly in an endless torrent known as the Noise. There are no secrets. Every fear, every lie, every fleeting thought spills into the open. Even the animals have Noise. Todd has grown up believing this is simply the way the world works. After all, the same mysterious germ that gave men the Noise supposedly killed every woman in the settlement years before.

Raised by his kind-hearted foster fathers, Ben and Cillian, Todd’s world is turned upside down during an ordinary trip into the swamp when he stumbles across something that shouldn’t exist at all: a pocket of complete silence. And at the centre of that silence… a girl.

From that moment, Patrick Ness launches readers into one of the most gripping, inventive and emotionally charged adventures in young adult fiction.  Asking powerful questions about truth, fear, power and what it really means to become an adult. The Knife of Never Letting Go is fast-paced, thought-provoking and impossible to put down, it’s the unforgettable opening to one of the greatest YA trilogies ever written.