Other dystopian stories like The Handmaid’s Tale might seem particularly chilling in a moment when democracy feels like it’s under threat, but The Unit is haunting in its assertion that democracy itself isn’t enough. Holmqvist’s writing is spare in style, elegantly succinct, but the layers of the world she’s created are manifold. Is it criminal, she wonders, to live a quiet life dedicated only to self-actualization? Do artists who never achieve greatness have value? Does every citizen have a responsibility to contribute to their society? In exploring such questions, Holmqvist takes liberal assumptions about Scandinavian paternalism versus American individualism and flips them upside down. Holmqvist’s intention isn’t realism – it’s to unravel and critique assumptions about the meaning of life. The domed environment and omnipresent cameras seem to predict Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy the prospect of forcible organ donation brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The Unit contains elements that echo a number of different speculative and dystopian works. Here, the justification for horror – the extraction of human tissue from the childfree – is secular, a capitalist democracy demanding its toll. The Unit feels like an inversion of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, where fertile women are forcibly impregnated under biblical sanction. ‘Ninni Holmqvist’s book The Unit, newly reissued, imagines a world in which people who haven’t procreated are forced to make a different – ultimate – contribution to society. But she soon falls in love, and this unexpected, improbable happiness throws the future into doubt.Ĭlinical and haunting, The Unit is a modern-day classic and a spine-chilling cautionary tale about the value of human life.

When Dorrit Weger arrives at the Unit, she resigns herself to this fate, seeking only peace in her final days. It’s an idyllic place, but there’s a catch: the residents – known as dispensables – must donate their organs, one by one, until the final donation. With lavish apartments set amongst beautiful gardens and state-of-the-art facilities, elaborate gourmet meals, and wonderful music and art, they are free of financial worries and want for nothing. Ninni Holmqvist’s eerie dystopian novel envisions a society in the not-so-distant future where men and women deemed economically worthless are sent to a retirement community called the Unit. ‘Echoing work by Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood, The Unit is as thought-provoking as it is compulsively readable.’ Jessica Crispin, NPR.org I know you will be riveted, as I was.’ Margaret Atwood

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