On a winter’s evening in 2041, 14-year-old Tom arrives at Albans School, tucked away in an isolated Blue Mountains location west of Sydney – a special school for children with disabilities. Tom doesn’t speak, can’t hear and has no word recognition. Watching Tom’s arrival from the school library is Abbey, a book that no one has ever read.Abbey’s desperate need to be read drives her to find a way to communicate with Tom and unleashes a terrifying and thrilling adventure.They encounter a global conspiracy using artificial intelligence to control the minds of the younger generation – the inheritors. Together, they forge an exceptional team to fight back, from the very place the global conspirators plan to destroy – imagination.As they confront increasingly perilous challenges, they come to understand why they are like they are and the meaning of partnership.Books become the guiding influence as Tom and Abbey light the flame of self-belief to rise above their limitations. To fight for a new generation’s right to freely choose the society in which they want to live and who they want to be.
Peter Scott is a Sydney-based software developer and part-time writer. His research and writing interest are life journeys of people and family heirlooms—what the journeys reveal about family, society and change through time. In 2019, he identified 212 entries in an Australian schoolgirl’s 1909–1912 autograph album, and outlined 100 lives. The time before today’s technology, their life choices and how society treated them. It inspired The Face Beyond the Window set in 2041.
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The book reads like a combination of a magical realism novel and a philosophical thriller which successfully makes the cross over from young adult to adult audience (similar to the Harry Potter books). Its wide ranging, current and prescient themes are deeply sinister but relentlessly hopeful because underpinning throughout the plot, characters, and action is that imagination is boundless and salvational. To cap it off, it also reads like a love story. Crucially the messages are very powerful without being didactic. It's so highly visual with such pace and excitement that it would also make a great film.
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