Like prison-break movie THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION with teenagers
The story begins with Mo, Harete and Moth on the run, chased by the tyrannical forces of the Institute. Then, it flashes back to the weeks leading up to their break out. As the three teens follow a line of pylons towards the Other country and the hope of freedom, we see how they cobble together their friendship and the tools of their escape.
As the teens weave together stories from their past, present and imaginations, the truth becomes harder and harder to bear. Only the long line of wires and the lure of another way of life pulls them towards their goal.
A story of hope, peril and the fight against tyranny, written by a debut author with a degree in particle physics, every word is knocked against those surrounding it to form a fascinating action-packed read. The sound was an anguished, mournful drone that cycled in pitch and spread itself like poison gas over the land. When we first heard it, we were clutching our stitch-sore sides and spitting on the ground, shattered from the chase between the pylons.
'What's that? What are they up to now?' wailed Harete.
'A siren,' I wheezed. 'Perhaps we've been spotted.'
'What's their game?'
'Chess,' said Moth. We lumbered onto pylon five, the terror behind us hidden in the freezing, ground-hugging cloud. 'We move forwards one pylon-square at a time, like pawns!'
He was wrong. You can only move to an empty square in chess, and each of ours already had a castle on it, a tower made of metal struts.
'Hide and seek,' panted Harete. Wrong again, I thought, stumbling over the muddy corrugations and trying to ignore the cold air that cut my lungs, for in that game you take turns. Our game was one I'd seen played when I was a child, staying in the slum apartment of a distant aunt. A plump cockroach was scurrying over the floor, resisting every attempt by my aunt to trap it under a cup. So she lifted up an edge of the carpet and started to laboriously roll it up. Soon, the cockroach was trapped in a narrow gap between the advancing tube of rolled rug and the wall. Next, my aunt ran a coal shovel sideways along the gap, until the cockroach was hemmed into a corner. Then she dropped a flat iron on it. Elon Dann grew up in rural Lincolnshire, where his childhood was one of 'sensational boredom and ordinariness set against eye-strainingly wide fields of barley on which V-bombers cast triangular shadows'. Television educated him, although he did attend the local grammar school for appearance's sake. At eighteen he left Lincolnshire for Manchester, where he studied Physics and idolised Bertrand Russell and Kurt Vonnegut.
After a spell of being an academic, Elon has worked in various IT jobs. He now lives with his wife and two children in Worcestershire. At the weekend he enjoys voluntary litter-picking, 'sifting through the cast-off waste of society like a lanky Womble'. CLOCKWISE TO TITAN is Elon's first book. Like prison-break movie THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION with teenagers Debut from highly creative UK author with an ingenious imagination Discussion pack perfect for schools, libraries and reading groups will be available Tease readers into the story with chapter sampling ahead of release in schools Interactive online site - plan your escape route and explore maps of the Institute and the world beyond
