Film of a young boy flying round the Earth in a homemade spaceship brings the world's media to Horsepool's Hill, where the boy, Charlie Ellis, and his engineer, Steve Atherton, announce they are going on a day trip to Mars, an adventure matched in danger only by their new-found fame. In this, the first novel in the Charlie Ellis series, Paul Sutton fuses the arts of science and storytelling, within a collage of pop culture, philosophy and humour, to detail the coming of age of an English boy growing up in an era of big technology and big government. An elegiac novel about innocence and responsibility. "A richly imaginative fusion of Carl Sagan, Jules Verne and The Little Prince.".