Philip Reeve

In A DARKLING PLAIN, Philip Reeve brilliantly completes the breath-taking adventures that began with MORTAL ENGINES. Wren Natsworthy is enjoying life as an aviatrix but her father Tom is troubled by matters of the heart - the last, shocking, encounter with Hester, and the old wound caused by Pennyroyal's bullet. Meanwhile the fragile truce between the Green Storm and the Traction Cities splinters and hostility breaks out again. Events are set on a collision course as things end where they began, with London...

Anchorage has become a static settlement on the shores of the Dead Continent, and its inhabitants have been living peacefully for sixteen years. But now trouble is approaching - in a limpet sub, and fast. The Lost Boys are back, and they'll do anything to get what they want. Tom and Hester's daughter Wren is their eager dupe, bored and desperate for adventure. When the theft of the mysterious Tin Book of Anchorage goes wrong, Wren is snatched away in the limpet, who knows where. Tom and Hester set off to rescue her, but this is the end of their quiet life on Anchorage. The journey will stir up old needs, old secrets - and send them back into perilous waters...

Tom and Hester have been thrown together. Truly-thrown out of a city on wheels that's left them stranded and starving in the middle of nowhere while it hares off after its prey. Hester is desperate for revenge, and Tom is only desperate to get back on board his beloved London. This is a stunning literary debut from Philip Reeve. A novel that defies easy categorisation, it is a gripping adventure story set in an inspired fantasy world, where moving cities trawl the globe. Peopled with convincing and utterly likeable characters, this story is a magical and unique read.

Fleeing from an Anti-Tractionist sect, the Green Storm, Tom and Hester are left drifting in the frozen Ice Wastes, slowly dying of cold after the Jenny Haniver's engines have failed. They are saved at the last minute, finding Anchorage, a once-beautiful ice city that has fallen on hard times. Crippled by plague, there are barely fifty souls on Anchorage now, and the teenage margravine has made a desperate choice. They are heading for America, the Dead Continent...

Now in paperback, this is a stirring and captivating reworking of Arthurian myth from the multi-award-winning author of A Darkling Plain and Mortal Engines. Gwyna is bound into service to Myrddin the bard, and he transforms her into a goddess, a boy warrior and a spy. Without her he cannot work the most glorious transformation of all, and turn the leader of a raggle-taggle war-band into the greatest hero of all - King Arthur. Ages: 12-16yrs.