A really creepy piece of speculative fiction, set some time in the near future; an organisation is trying to save people from their fruitless lives. The impossible mundane lives that end up in insurmountable debt - unfortunately this organisation is not providing the utopia it promises to all of it's "volunteers".
Some excellent and disturbing ideas, my only problem with this were the lead characters, I found it quite difficult to be sympathetic at times.
But on the whole the book was well written and is a recommendation for fans of the genre.

We never find out when exactly The Transition is set, but let's say it's 10 or 15 years from now, and its protagonists, Karl and Genevieve, are a vaguely nightmarish but entirely plausible vision of how many university-educated millennials might expect to end up. In their mid-thirties, they're married and have reasonably well-paid jobs – Genevieve's a teacher, Karl's rather more dubious career involves ghostwriting students' essays and fake product reviews – but they're still renting a room in a shared house, both have massive amounts of credit card debt, and don't feel they can afford to have kids. When Karl's card-skimming leads to a conviction for fraud, he's offered a place on a scheme called 'The Transition' in lieu of a prison sentence. It means he and Genevieve will spend six months living with a pair of older 'mentors' who'll help them get their lives back on track; at the end of it, they're promised reduced debts, a downpayment on a 'dream home', and improvements in everything from their health to their marriage. Of course, he takes it.

I'm not the first reviewer to liken this book to Black Mirror – the ingenious-yet-credible technology in the background (driverless taxis, fridges that automatically reorder food) makes it a natural comparison – and I certainly won't be the last, but The Transition also belongs to a longer tradition of novels warning of the dangers of our immediate future and the horror of conformity. Stories like these often hinge on the idea that to live happily in the future society, one must adhere rigidly to an accepted set of behaviours; that humanity is lost in the march towards technological progress. And so it goes here: as the initially resistant Genevieve is gradually seduced by the benefits of the scheme, Karl is undone by his curiosity. His natural instinct to explore the mentors' home backfires when he discovers a locked cellar. And then a URL carved into the floor. And then a rumour about The Transition being based on a banned novel...

The interesting thing about The Transition, however, is that it isn't a condemnation: contrary to expectations, there's no preaching. What's particularly clever is that it's repeatedly anticlimactic, second-guessing its audience's anticipation of conspiracies, villains and shocking twists at every turn. All this at the same time as keeping the level of intrigue consistently high, throwing in new reasons for Karl to be suspicious of everyone around him, and introducing supporting characters who are used in brilliantly unpredictable ways. It all feels effortless, but when you step back and think about it, a stupendous balancing act is being pulled off here.

In the end, as one character says, 'isn't the real lesson here that we're not very nice and we don't give a shit about each other?' It might not be the most inspiring message, but the way The Transition presents it makes a sardonic, warped and honest sort of sense. Regardless of the world they live in, these people are just people, doing things human beings have always done to survive and to protect those they love. The bad guys are just as human as the good guys. And even if our heroes behave awfully – as Karl and Genevieve both do, in very different ways – we can't help but root for them.

In a slightly futuristic dystopia, the narrator struggles to find his way through the programme that seems to offer a way out for him and his wife, but nothing is quite what it seems. Great ideas and I liked the laconic but engaging style.