Toby Alone, originally published as La Vie suspendue, or A Life Suspended, is a children's novel by French author Timothée de Fombelle.
A 13-year-old boy named Toby Lolness, who is just one and a half millimetres tall, lives in a civilization nestled in an oak tree.
On his seventh birthday, his father, a scientist named Sim, creates a black box that causes one of his toys to move around by harnessing the power of crude sap.
However, when Sim refuses to tell anybody how he did it, he and his family are banished to the Lower Branches, where Toby meets his best friend, Elisha Lee, for the first time.
When Toby is thirteen, his parents are arrested by the evil corporate tyrant Joe Mitch, who has a pathological obsession with hole-digging, and thrown into a prison on a mistletoe ball called Tumble.
He desperately wants to learn how to use the sap for his biggest project, the Big Crater, a massive hole in the middle of the tree, and Toby finds himself on the run from his own people.
The night of the planned escape, Toby is trapped in a wax cast, pretending to be the jailor Gus Alzan's injured daughter Berenice.