The Knife of Never Letting Go

Imagine you're the only boy in a town of men. And you can hear everything they think. And they can hear everything you think. Imagine you don't fit in with their plans... Todd Hewitt is just one month away from the birthday that will make him a man. But his town has been keeping secrets from him. Secrets that are going to force him to run... The new edition of this unflinching novel about fear, flight and the terrifying path of self-discovery features the short story, The New World. Set before the events of The Knife of Never Letting Go, it is the story of Viola's dramatic journey to the New World.

The story, narrated sparkily and saltily by its hero Todd, unpeels Prentisstown's dark secrets like the layers of a very rotten onion. Ness, an acclaimed author of adult fiction as well, moves things along at a breakneck pace, and Todd's world is filled with memorable characters, foul villains. Financial Times
An impossibly good novel. It is at once endearing yet unsentimental; compassionate yet damning; exhaustingly exhilarating and yet tempered by a staid and considered emotivity. Written in the first-person present tense in an unapologetically impudent manner, this novel captures exceptionally the brash bravado and the underlying insecurities that actively teem inside the minds and explode in the actions of boys on their path to manhood.
THERE HAVE BEEN SEVERAL excellent debuts in recent months and perhaps the most impressive is Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go. It's the story of Todd, the last boy in a community of men. In Prentisstown, the Noise virus has left men with the ability to hear each other's thoughts, those of animals too. The idea may send shivers up the spine, but how different is it to the constant intrusion of e-mails, texts, advertisements and CCTV we already suffer? When Todd finds a lone girl in the marshes he realises they have to escape, which isn't easy when your hunters can hear your every thought. Written in Todd's characteristic vernacular and brimming over with ideas about adolescence, faith and free will, this is intelligent, immersive storytelling. -- Keith Gray The Scotsman
A book like no other. It's one of the most gripping, fantastical reads around. -- Camilla de la Bedoyere Sunday Express
Darkly imagined and brilliantly created, the painful dystopian setting of a world full of noise in which all thoughts can be heard as if spoken is the background to this tense coming of age story. The Guardian

Patrick Ness is the award-winning and bestselling author of A Monster Calls, More Than This, The Rest of Us Just Live Here and Release. John Green has described him as "an insanely beautiful writer". He has won every major prize in children's fiction, including the Carnegie Medal twice. He has written the screenplay for the film of A Monster Calls and the BBC Dr Who spin-off, Class. The first Chaos Walking film is slated for release in 2020. He lives in Los Angeles.

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