The Unit (Ninni Holmqvist)

What a sad book. It is set at some unnamed future time in Scandinavia, when men over 60 and women over 50 are either needed (primarily by having children, occasionally by virtue of important professions) or dispensible, and dispensible people go into a Unit. While there they are very well cared for (it's a lovely place with all the amenities and all for free), but they have to make themselves useful to society by participating in medical and psychological experiments and donating organs and tissues needed by the needed people. Their existence is truly a gilded cage. As people start making themselves needed more consistently (teens start having babies, just to be sure), the number of dispensible people drops relative to the population, and they start reducing the exempt professions and lowering the entrance age to ensure their supply of organs and participants. There's a side theme about feminism carried too far (it's basically illegal for a man to flirt with a woman or even to display his physical strength too much), but it's not really developed. In fact, the sociology of the whole dispensible/needed concept and the forced induction into the unit isn't really developed. This is just the story of one woman undergoing this experience, from beginning to end. Nicely written (and translated) and, in many ways, engrossing, but left me wondering about so many things.