Description

Hugo Horiot is in love with wheels and all that cranks or turns. He is obsessed with the otherworldly language of pipes—they run, he imagines, from his family home to the center of the earth.

He causes endless trouble at home and hates school. He muses: “I dream asleep, I dream awake”—but he dreams so hard he shuts out the world with reveries that are not just curious but dangerous and painful too.

School is a prison he must escape, his teachers oppressors, and his classmates “a band of jolly torturers.” This is the portrait of a boy who might happen to suffer from autism, but who is also a beautiful rebel inspired to blaze his own path through childhood to find an enduring sense of personal freedom.

“Truth glares from the pages, which we read with heart overflowing, sharing the experience of the boy trapped inside himself.” —La Libre Belgique

“Equal parts love and pain, Hugo Horiot’s evocative account of his struggle with Autism Spectrum Disorder shares with us the penetrating insights of a tortured mind at odds with a society that does not accept him. In allowing the reader to enter the private world he retreated into as a child, Horiot forces us to reevaluate how we view those with psychological differences.” —Christopher Teare, Cognitive Training For Autism, Harvard University