Apparently this is a YA book that's been out for a while, but since it's been an even longer time since I was a YA, I'd somehow missed its existence till now. I picked up the audiobook from the local library after reading a recommendation for it among lists of dystopian fiction, and I did enjoy it; quite a short listen at only 5 hours so it must be quite a quick read in text.

The story follows 11-going-on-12 year-old Jonas, through whose eyes we slowly begin to understand the community in which he lives. What seems at first to just be metaphor, for example about how things are colourless and how everything is the same, is slowly is revealed to be literal truth. It's very cleverly done the way the book slowly feeds the reader bits of information that bit by bit reveal a picture of an increasingly artificial, dystopian community where conformity and contentment are idealized at the expense of, well, pretty much everything else. When Jonah turns 12 he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory and only then does he - and we through his eyes - start to understand how different his community is from our own, and what his predecessors chose to give up in order to create a "perfect" world.

It's very reminiscent in many ways of 1984, and is a cutting but very simply laid out examination of what exactly it would really mean to eliminate inequality and pain for every single person. Very thought-provoking. From reading other reviews I have also just learned that a movie was made of this, which I may need to go check out now.