Winner of The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize
An unflinching novel about the impossible choices
of growing up...
"The first thing you find out when your dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."
It's hard to review The Knife of Never Letting Go without spoiling the story. It's so cunningly written that I was 100 pages in before I even realised what genre it was. I will say this, though: it lives up to the thrill of that first sentence.
It's not only his dog's thoughts that the hero, Todd Hewitt, can hear.
As the result of a virus, all the men in Prentisstown can hear each others' thoughts all the time. The resulting ongoing background jabber is called The Noise. It's a brilliant invention and, like a lot of brilliant inventions - Pullman's daemons, Philip Reeve's traction cities - it's an illuminating transformation of something very familiar.
The Noise made me more sharply aware of the static of MP3s, mobile phones, announcements, adverts, surveillance and traffic that interferes when we try to tune into our own thoughts, of the way our minds have been colonised by the market.
When Todd finds a pool of silence moving through the marshes at the edge of Prentisstown, it's not just a good plot point, it's also a stab of unexpected beauty. The source of that silence is a girl. There are no girls in Prentisstown, and finding her means that Todd has to escape. The book - which is the first part of a trilogy - is mostly the story of their flight. Frank Cottrell Boyce
Watch the author interviewed about his Chaos Walking Trilogy
About the Author
Patrick Ness is the author of The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer – books one and two in the award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy. Patrick has written two other books for adults and is a literary critic for the Guardian. He lives in London.
The silent bark - The Knife of Never Letting Go is a deftly told tale of a boy's flight, says Frank Cottrell Boyce in The Guardian
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