Book Description Jack is five. He lives in with his Ma in a world called Room that measures twelve foot by twelve. The contents of Room and the light that comes in the skylight are real to him; everything else is just TV. There are things Jack loves, like watching Dora the Explorer or having Best (as he calls breastfeeding), and things he hates, like green beans or the visits to his Ma of the man they call Old Nick (in the evenings, when Jack is meant to be asleep in the wardrobe). As Jack starts putting the pieces together, Ma reveals that she is from a bigger world, the Outside, and that Old Nick kidnapped her seven years ago, when she was 19. That Room is actually a reinforced, cork-lined garden shed, somewhere in America. That she and Jack are never going to get rescued, so the real question is whether they will risk their lives in order to escape. Although inspired by recent headlines, Room is pure fiction. Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, it is no tearjerker or horror story, but a celebration of resilience. Like John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, it looks at cruelty with the clean eyes of childhood, but like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, it locates hope in the limitless bond between parent and child. In the tradition of Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Crusoe, Room is a startling, at times satirical, tale of a hero from somewhere else journeying to - and finding himself less than entirely impressed by - a brave new w