The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot is a novel for younger readers by the American author and illustrator Peter Brown, published in 2016.

Roz is a service robot, and the ship carrying her has gone down off an island where nothing is built for machines. She begins by watching, because the animals around her are the only source of information she has, and she learns to move quietly, to find shelter and eventually to talk to them. Most of them want nothing to do with her. The book follows her through the seasons of the island, through a winter that nearly finishes her and through the friendships she makes with the creatures who live there, and it treats those animals as neighbours with opinions of their own rather than as scenery. Roz's difficulty is that she was manufactured for a purpose, and the people who know what that purpose is eventually come looking for her.

Brown wrote and illustrated the story himself, and the island is built up in short chapters from the small practical business of one robot's day.