The Giver

The Giver was published in 1993 and is Lois Lowry's best-known novel, written after her earlier books about a wartime childhood and about a girl with a fatal illness. It won the Newbery Medal in 1994 and has been a fixture of American middle-school reading lists since, which has also made it one of the most frequently challenged books in school districts: the complaints tend to involve its treatment of death, its suggestion that a child might choose to leave home, and the community's practice of releasing members who do not fit.

The setting is the main character of the story. Lowry builds a town where climate is controlled, colour has been engineered out of perception and every household runs on a script that is read aloud each morning. Pain and love have been removed from memory and stored instead in a single individual, whose job is to hold the past so that the rest of the community does not have to. Jonas takes that job, discovers what it has cost the people around him, and finds that the arrangement he has inherited requires him to participate in decisions he cannot accept. The relationship between Jonas and the old man who shares the memories with him is the emotional centre of the book.

Three companion novels followed, set in the same world: Gathering Blue in 2000, Messenger in 2004 and Son in 2012, and the four are now usually sold as the Giver Quartet. A film adaptation was released in 2014. The novel is short enough for younger readers and unusual among dystopias in ending on a note that the author has always declined to explain.