Futuretrack 5 by Robert Westall

Relaunch of spectacular Robert Westall fantasy novel that was way ahead of its time.

A fantasy of the near future in which Britain is divided into Zones and castes to which men and women are pitilessly allocated at the end of their schooling. Whether crazed proles in the Unnem zones, smug pampered bourgeois Ests or arrogant Techs, all are ultimately pawns of the computer that governs it all. One boy penetrates the conspiracy by which the nation is governed and has the knowhow to strike at the heart of evil.

This novel was originally published in 1983 and was runner up for the Carnegie Medal. It's a fantastic, if bleak, vision of the future - all the more scary because many of its 'Big Brother' elements are so evident in our society today.

Robert Westall was born October 1929, in Tynemouth, England. His first book, The Machine Gunners, was published in 1975, for which he won the Carnegie Medal. Amongst many more prizes and accolades, he won the Carnegie for the second time in 1980, with The Scarecrows. He died in 1993.