The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Um, wow.  This book was published in 2008 and I'm only hearing about it now?  Todd Hewitt is the last boy to become a man in Prentisstown, a place where only men exist after an illness killed all the women.  It's also a place where everyone else can hear each other's thoughts, called Noise.  A person's Noise can be heard and if you are close enough, it can be seen and felt.  There is no hiding what you think.  When a boy turns thirteen, he officially becomes a man in Pretisstown and Todd can hardly wait.  One day while he is at the swamp collecting apples, he hears something outside of his understanding.  He hears nothing.  Emptiness.  In the form of a girl.  But girls aren't supposed to exist, are they?  Todd's discovery of the absence of Noise (this girl, whose thoughts cannot be heard) turns his world on its head.  He is immediately sent away from Prentisstown.  Since he didn't know there was a place outside of Prentisstown, it seems that pretty quickly there is a huge list of things that aren't the way the were supposed to be.  All of a sudden an army of men is after him.  He must leave everything behind in order to save himself.  He runs although he doesn't really understand why he's running or why he's running with this girl.  I'm not sure what to tell you other than read this book.  There is just so much there.  If the plot doesn't get you, the narrator's voice surely will.  Or that of his dog.  Dogs have Noise too.  How cool is that?  This is book one in a trilogy called Chaos Walking.