The White Mountains

Life goes on largely as it had in the pre-industrial era, except that all adult humans are subject to Tripod control. Protagonist Will Parker, a thirteen-year-old boy living in the fictional English village of Wherton, is looking forward to being Capped at the next Capping Day, until a chance meeting with a mysterious fake-Capped man named Ozymandias (taking his name from a poem he frequently recites) prompts him to discover a world beyond the Tripods' control. He is accompanied by his cousin Henry and later by a French teenager named Jean-Paul Deliet, nicknamed "Beanpole". The novel climaxes with Henry and Beanpole discovering that earlier, when Will was captured by a Tripod, he was unknowingly implanted with a tracking device. When Henry and Beanpole remove the device, a nearby Tripod attacks them, but the boys defeat the Tripod and elude subsequent efforts to find them. The story ends with them joining the resistance, located in the eponymous White Mountains.