Mortal Engines

"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."

London, the great traction metropolis, has been hiding in the hills to evade the Great Hunting Ground's larger, quicker, and more ravenous cities. But now Lord Mayor Mangus Crome's evil schemes may finally come to pass.

Tom, a humble third-class apprentice, steps in just in time to rescue the heart of Thaddeus Valentine, London's Head Historian and much-loved famed archaeologist, and his gorgeous daughter Katherine, who is down in The Gut as the young assassin with the black scarf strikes at him. Tom sees the girl's horrifying visage as he chases after her: a single eye that is staring back at him, her nose crushed into a stump, and her forehead and jaw completely scarred. She yells, "Look at what your Valentine did to me!" Query him! What did he do to Hester Shaw, please? She then leaps to her death into the waste chute. Tom finds himself in the Out-Country, a sea of mud marked by the enormous caterpillar tracks of cities like to the one that is now blasting out over the horizon, after falling down the same chute minutes later.

Set in a dark and entirely unique universe driven by Municipal Darwinism -- and treachery -- Philip Reeve has produced a terrible, frightening, memorable adventure novel of surprises in his astounding literary debut.