Critical Praise

"A dark and thought-provoking tale of our contemporary world where everything is directed to achieving results, and about the feeling of being an outsider that childlessness can lead to."

—Svenska Dagbladet

"Holmqvist echoes political-science treatises like Hobbes’ Leviathan and Rousseau’s The Social Contract (gone decidedly mad here), as well as the usual dystopian novels from Brave New World to 1984… Orwellian horrors in a Xanadu on Xanax --- creepily profound and most provocative."

—Kirkus Reviews

"What a remarkable novel Ninni Holmqvist has written. The Unit achieves the feat of being both a mental condition and a geographical place. Inside itself and at the same time outside. Something taking place in fiction, as well as a description of a society with control and supervision."

—Corren

"The Unit is ‘Logan’s Run’ without the lasers, a sleek, haunting depiction of extreme social engineering set on terrain that readers may find unsettlingly familiar, populated by figures we recognize a bit too clearly. Page after page, with an austere precision, Holmqvist asks us to reconsider our notions of human dignity in a post-moral world where people are, quite literally, dispensable."

—Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times

"[A] chilling, stunning debut novel...Holmqvist’s fluid, mesmerizing novel offers unnerving commentary on the way society devalues artistic creation while elevating procreation, and speculation on what it would be like if that was taken to an extreme. For Orwell and Huxley fans."

—Booklist

"Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, this novel imagines a chilling dystopia: single, childless, midlife women are considered dispensable. At 50 the narrator, Dorrit, is taken to a facility where non-vital organs will be harvested one by one for people more valued by society; she knows that eventually she’ll have to sacrifice something essential like her heart. Dorrit accepts her fate --- until she falls in love and finds herself breaking the rules."

—More Magazine