Age 9-13

Reeves’s remarkable new novel imagines that the Victorians travelled to the moon. Aimed at younger readers than the author’s Moving Cities sequence, this space adventure is more Jules Verne than Arthur C Clarke. The technology has the quality of Victorian engineering, plus a few alchemical miracles, and Reeve has explorers of the era, such as Richard Burton, traversing the outer reaches of the universe instead of the interior of Africa. The story is narrated by young Arthur Mumby, who lives with his prim sister Myrtle in Larklight, a gothic house on the moon (splendidly depicted in David Wyatt’s Mervyn Peake-ish illustrations), until one day they receive a disastrous visit from a space monster. In the company of Jack Havock, a dashing piratical boy who sails the ether with a crew of aliens, Arthur and Myrtle embark on adventures that take them to Mars and Saturn and to the Crystal Palace in London. The book is notable for the completeness and detail of Reeve’s invented spacescape. He deftly balances the historical and the fantastical, drawing on Victorian voices and references while creating something out of this world.

LARKLIGHT by Philip Reeve, illustrations by David Wyatt

(Bloomsbury £12.99)

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