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The description for this edition doesn't match the dust jacket, which has:

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There are novels of the future which belong to the realm of pure science fiction, where one delights in the creation of strange worlds, and peoples, and the author's predictions of what science may uncover. Others, as satire or political fable – a 1984 or Brave New World – use the future as a springboard for the author's own ideas. Mockingbird belongs firmly to the second tradition, and as one might expect from the author of such books as The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, he has produced a novel which is part fable, part science fiction, part novel of ideas: perhaps impossible to categorise, not least because, as in any good novel, one is finally moved by the people who live in it, and by what happens to them. It is certainly not a book that one forgets.

The story itself is set in the next century: in a world controlled by robots, where reading is forgotten and illegal. Only Paul Bentley, discovering a book one day, decides to teach himself to read and later finds a girlfriend, Mary Lou, willing to help him fight against the system. Opposed to them is the master robot, Spofforth, who while he must defeat their ambitions has a sense of human sympathies which makes him only too vulnerable to the cause they are fighting.