Sora is a Japanese teenager, 17 years old, who has contracted a cruel disease, which will gradually take him to his very end. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a debilitating illness, has taken away his ability to walk, eat or even go to school. He’s going to die soon, in his bedroom, on his last legs, but no one in his family is ready to accept it.

Until he meets friends on the Internet. Friends who see him without pity in his eyes, those who see him for who he is, those who don’t care whether he’s “normal” or not.

Sora has always respected the way of the samurai and how they regarded death as a new journey. With his friends, Mai and Kaito, he takes his future into his own hands. He will leave life on his own conditions, not because his illness finally defeated him.

• The Last Leaves Falling, by Sarah Benwell

I’m not one to cry over books. Sure, I’ve been sad, heartbroken, frustrated, and terrified, but not once has a single tear left my eyes throughout the journey.

Until now.

The Last Leaves Falling is an incredibly powerful book, a contemporary modern tale of friendship, acceptance, and most of all, hope. There are many tales I’ve read that have brought me to my very knees with their spellbinding messages, and this was one of them. If I were to rate it, I’d give it a unanimous 100.

A hauntingly devastating debut novel, I would recommend this to every single person out there. Even those who aren’t interested in reading.

• Benwell infuses the haunting melodies of Japanese samurai poems with Sora’s raw frustration and anger at the fact that he can’t go on. He won’t live to go to university or become a baseball player like he always wanted to. The very plot pulls you in, and you can feel Sora’s emotions at every turn, his sadness, his powerful self-faith, his platonic love for his newfound friends, and at last, the revelation that he would have to leave soon. You can feel his heartbreaking decision resonate through the very crevices of your heart(where I bawled my eyes out, but that’s beside the point☹.)
• The story follows a mix of online interactions and physical conversations, as Sora meets his friends online. The unbreakable bond between the three had me in tears(seriously, YOU HAVE TO READ THIS)and following their lives until the very end had my soul aching, happy and grieving at the same time.
• From the start, the plot tells you what Sora feels like having such a terrible illness, and how he perceives his surroundings because of that affliction. There were times when I wanted to scream along with it, finding his situation so unfair. It kept you questioning and wondering till the very end, would it have ended differently if he didn’t have his friends? Would it have been different if he didn’t have this disease? In an implicit way, the book also urges you to consider the lives of other people like Sora and be grateful for the fact that you can see your future and not have it clouded by an inevitable demise.
• Death is a topic that most societies will shy away from. It’s not something discussed quite often, and neither is the very pressing, very widespread topic of suicide. This book explores these heavy topics in a way that is inspiring and uplifting and shows us the power of holding hope in ourselves and DREAMING, not giving up.

This is an absolutely brilliant book. Harrowing, straightforward, raw, and yet somehow, still motivating, it’s a book I would recommend over and over and over again. Covering death, euthanasia, today’s culture, and its explicit issues, it teaches us to have faith in ourselves and be true to ourselves, in a thought-provoking way. In fact, it teaches us to seize our own futures, instead of succumbing to our own monsters.

In fact, it quite reminds me of that line from the poem ‘Invictus’, by William Ernest Henley, “I am the master of my fate”.

What do you think?

Signing off…