ContentsTitle PageContentsCopyrightDedicationIntroductionOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelveThirteenFourteenFifteenSixteenSeventeenEighteenNineteenTwentyTwenty-oneTwenty-twoTwenty-threeSample Chapter from GATHERING BLUEBuy the BookThe Giver QuartetAbout the Author Text copyright © 1993 by Lois LowryAll rights reserved. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Houghton MifflinBooks for Children, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2000.For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York10003.www.hmhco.comThe Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:The giver / by Lois Lowryp. cm.Summary: Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver ofmemories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the societyin which he lives.[1. Science fiction.] I. Title.PZ7.L9673Gi 1993 92-15034[Fic]—dc20 CIPACISBN: 978-0-547-99566-3 hardcoverISBN: 978-0-544-33626-1 paperbackeISBN 978-0-547-34590-1v8.0915 For all the childrenTo whom we entrust the future IntroductionTwenty years? No kidding: twenty years? It’s hard to believe.Twenty years ago, I was—well, I was much younger. My parents were still alive. Two of mygrandchildren had not yet been born, and another one, now in college, was an infant.Twenty years ago I didn’t own a cell phone. I didn’t know what quinoa was and I doubt I had evertasted kale.There had recently been a war. Now we refer to that one as the First Gulf War, but back then,mercifully, we didn’t know there would be another.Maybe a lot of us weren’t even thinking about the future then. But I was. And I’m a writer.I wrote The Giver on a big machine that had recently taken the place of my much-loved typewriter,and after I printed the pages, very noisily, I had to tear them apart, one by one, at the perforated edges.(When I referred to it as my computer, someone more knowledgeable pointed out that my machinewas not a computer. It was a dedicated word processor. “Oh, okay then,” I said, as if I understood thedifference.)As I carefully separated those two hundred or so pages, I glanced again at the words I had typed onthem. I could see that I had written a complete book. It had all the elements of the seventeen or sobooks I had written before, the same things students of writing list on school quizzes: characters, plot,setting, tension, climax. (Though I didn’t reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me someyears later, with the request “Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver,” I’m sure itcontained those as well.) I had typed THE END after the intentionally ambiguous final paragraphs.But I was aware that this book was different from the many I had already written.My editor, when I gave him the manuscript, realized the same thing. If I had drawn a cartoon of himreading those pages, it would have had a text balloon over his head. The text would have said,simply: Gulp.But nothing prepared me for the readers’ reactions. I had always received lots of letters from kids,frequently writing as a class assignment (one began, “This is a Friendly Letter”). Over the years, ofcourse, they have more often become emails. But that didn’t compare to the mail about The Giver:first of all for the volume—the sheer number of them (even now, twenty years later, they still come,sometimes fifty to sixty in a day). But now the letter writers were different. Sure, many of them werestill kids. But a startling number were much older. And the content was no longer the schoolassignment letter, the obligatory “I thought this was a pretty good book.” Instead the letters werepassionate (“This book has changed my life”), occasionally angry (“Jesus would be ashamed of you,”one woman wrote), and sometimes startlingly personal.One couple wrote to me about their autistic, selectively mute teenager, who had recently spoken tothem for the first time—about The Giver, urging them to read it. A teacher from South Carolina wrotethat the most disruptive, difficult student in her eighth grade class had called her at home on a no-school day and begged her to read him the next chapter over the phone. A night watchman in an oilrefinery wrote that he had happened on the book—it was lying on someone’s desk—while making hisrounds (“I’m not a reader,” he wrote me, “but man, I’m glad I came to work tonight”). A Trappistmonk wrote to me and said he considered the book a sacred text. A man who had, as an adult, fled thecult in which he had been raised, told me that his psychiatrist had recommended The Giver to him.Countless new parents have written to explain why their babies have been named Gabriel. A teacher in rural China sent me a photograph of beaming students holding up their copies of the book. The FBItook an interest in the two-hundred-page vaguely threatening letter sent by a man who insisted that hewas actually The Giver, and advised me not to go near the city where he lived. A teenage girl wrotethat she had been considering suicide until she read The Giver. One young man wrote a proposal ofmarriage to his girlfriend inside the book and gave it to her (she said yes). But a woman told me in aletter that I was clearly a disturbed person and she hoped I would get some help.Somehow, this book, and what it has to say, has touched a lot of people from all walks of life—andfrom many cultures, since over the years it has been translated into countless languages, from Czech toHungarian to Thai. Recently I have reluctantly turned down invitations to speak about The Giver inKyrgyzstan and Korea, where I am told readers are just as affected by it as they are in Toledo andTucson.A stage adaptation of The Giver has been performed in cities and towns across the USA for years.More recently an opera has been composed and performed. And soon there will be a film. Does TheGiver have the same effect when it is presented in a different way? It’s hard to know. A book, to me,is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own historyand beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as hedoes. There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat.The important thing is that another medium—stage, film, music—doesn’t obliterate a book. Themovie is here now, on a big screen, with stars and costumes and a score. But the book hasn’t goneaway. It has simply grown up, grown larger, and begun to glisten in a new way.—Lois Lowry OneIT WAS ALMOST December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought.Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened wasthe way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. Hehad seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its highspeed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, amoment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane.At first, he had been only fascinated. He had never seen aircraft so close, for it was against therules for Pilots to fly over the community. Occasionally, when supplies were delivered by cargoplanes to the landing field across the river, the children rode their bicycles to the riverbank andwatched, intrigued, the unloading and then the takeoff directed to the west, always away from thecommunity.But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but aneedle-nosed single-pilot jet. Jonas, looking around anxiously, had seen others—adults as well aschildren—stop what they were doing and wait, confused, for an explanation of the frightening event.Then all of the citizens had been ordered to go into the nearest building and stay there.IMMEDIATELY, the rasping voice through the speakers had said. LEAVE YOUR BICYCLES WHERE THEY ARE.Instantly, obediently, Jonas had dropped his bike on its side on the path behind his family’sdwelling. He had run indoors and stayed there, alone. His parents were both at work, and his littlesister, Lily, was at the Childcare Center where she spent her after-school hours.Looking through the front window, he had seen no people: none of the busy afternoon crew ofStreet Cleaners, Landscape Workers, and Food Delivery people who usually populated thecommunity at that time of day. He saw only the abandoned bikes here and there on their sides; anupturned wheel on one was still revolving slowly.He had been frightened then. The sense of his own community silent, waiting, had made hisstomach churn. He had trembled.But it had been nothing. Within minutes the speakers had crackled again, and the voice, reassuringnow and less urgent, had explained that a Pilot-in-Training had misread his navigational instructionsand made a wrong turn. Desperately the Pilot had been trying to make his way back before his errorwas noticed.NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED, the voice had said, followed by silence. There was anironic tone to that final message, as if the Speaker found it amusing; and Jonas had smiled a little,though he knew what a grim statement it had been. For a contributing citizen to be released from thecommunity was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.Even the children were scolded if they used the term lightly at play, jeering at a teammate whomissed a catch or stumbled in a race. Jonas had done it once, had shouted at his best friend, “That’s it,Asher! You’re released!” when Asher’s clumsy error had lost a match for his team. He had been takenaside for a brief and serious talk by the coach, had hung his head with guilt and embarrassment, andapologized to Asher after the game.Now, thinking about the feeling of fear as he pedaled home along the river path, he rememberedthat moment of palpable, stomach-sinking terror when the aircraft had streaked above. It was not whathe was feeling now with December approaching. He searched for the right word to describe his ownfeeling.
