Age 10 +

This is the final book in Reeve’s “Hungry Cities” sequence, his complex, extraordinary and futuristic epic of a world in which cities pursue and consume each other. In the earlier books, teenage airship aviators Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw faced danger, fell in love and were rent apart by betrayal, and we followed their daughter Wren and her friend Theo. This volume brings the story of all four characters to a conclusion, and its 500 pages are packed with powerful narratives: of a floating city being born out of a wrecked London; of devastating weapons from outer space; of a movement for peace led by a general’s wife; of a handsome and dangerous teenage rebel; of a robot emotionally attached to a human being; of a lost boy parented by a creature that is part killing machine; and of a cowardly writer/ adventurer who fabricates tales of his brave exploits... Too ambitious to summarise, this phenomenal work, which embraces continents and millennia, is violent and romantic, action-packed and contemplative, funny and frightening.

(Scholastic £12.99)

Philip Reeve discusses The Darkling Plain at the festival on Tuesday, March 28, at 4.30pm

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