Off the Road - Couverture rigide

When Tom's grandfather goes off the road, Tom is sure Gandy has gone mad. Tom knows that beyond the wall lies the Outside, a wild place filled with barbarians and unimaginable dangers. He also knows that Oldies are weak-minded. So Tom summons all his courage and goes after Gandy, who obviously doesn't know what he's doing. Or does he? Tom's experience in the strange, messy, emotional world Outside, where so many things prohibited to Insiders are taken for granted, quickly shakes all his certainties. Who is crazy, the Oldies who are sent to the Memory Theme Park, or the families who let them go? Is the Wall meant to keep the Outsiders out, as Tom has always been told--or the Insiders in? Master storyteller Nina Bawden, known for stories in which secrets from the past emerge in the present, has created a spellbinding adventure set in a future society with secrets that make it a chilling mirror of our own.

Nina Bawden was one of the UK's best writers for both adults and children. She often used her own childhood experiences in her books—Carrie's War is set in the mining valley in Wales where she lived as an evacuee in wartime. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford and finished her first novel the year after she took her degree. She won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for The Peppermint Pig. Nina died in 2012, aged 87.