The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

'There's just no such thing as silence. Not here, not nowhere. Not when your asleep, not when yer by yerself,  never. 

I am Todd Hewitt, I think to myself with my eyes closed. I am twelve years and twelve months old. I live in Prentisstown on New World. I will be a man in one month's time exactly.'

Tired of their broken and warring planet, a band of religious settlers travel through space in search of a simple life. Despite their best intentions, things don't exactly get off to a great start when they arrive. Because this new planet has the uncomfortable effect of making your thoughts audible and this doesn't exactly make for harmonious living. 

Todd is born into this New World in a cruel dead-end town full of bitter and broken men thinking bitter and broken thoughts. The women and girls of the town were killed off by the same virus that revealed their thoughts and the only bright spots in Todd's life are his two guardians Ben and Cillian and his daft dog Manchee. On a relatively quiet farm outside the town, the family of three scrape out a bearable living until the day that Todd discovers a mysterious patch of silence. Suddenly, everything changes. The town's sinister elders come for him with rifles and Todd has no choice but to flee. But why won't Ben and Cillian tell him where he needs to go? And how come they already had a bag packed for his departure? What does the silence mean?

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Warning: this book becomes incredibly hard to put down just after the mid-way point. It's a beast of a YA novel, almost 500 pages, and the pace initially took me some getting used to, especially with the cyclical nature of Manchee and Todd's speech. Patrick Ness has positioned Todd's internal dialogue as the narrative voice, and his efforts to represent natural thought processes makes for some repetition and slow going at first. But Ness is also incredibly skilled at creating separate distinct voices which he then weaves into the narrative. And Todd's thoughts naturally quicken alongside fast paced action, in a way that brings the reader right into the thick of the story. The sights and sounds he experiences are vividly described in what feels like real-time, and as the pace built I was truly sucked into the story.

I loved how immersed I became in this book, largely down to the unpredictable action. At one point I was literally repeating 'no!' out loud and committed the sin of skipping ahead pages to make sure I wasn't reading a dream sequence.

Ness clearly has a love of delving into the psyche of dark and creepy characters and some of the most chilling parts of the novel feature Todd attempting to do the same. But at the same time, he has also created other characters that manage to be both likable and multi-dimensional. It's clear that even in the New World, nobody's perfect. I love the fact that there are no perfect heroes in this book as it feels like a much more realistic representation of human nature. In the end, it is hope and affection that sets the characters apart, rather than plain good morals.

So the plot is unpredictable, engaging and shocking enough to satisfy the most blood-thirsty of young readers. It's hard to tell whether the unusual narrative style would put hesitant readers off or engage them. I've been a fan of kooky typography since first reading Jonathan Safran Foer so perhaps I'm biased. But it's definitely well worth a read - I'll certainly be getting my mits on the sequel.