Age 10+

Reeve won last year’s Carnegie Medal for Here Lies Arthur; he is also the author of the Mortal Engines quartet — one of the most ambitious and imaginative children’s novel sequences of the past 10 years — as well as the ingenious Larklight series for younger readers. Yet he is not the household name he deserves to be, despite an ardent following of those in the know. Fever Crumb is a prequel to Mortal Engines, and is set millenniums from now in London. It explains the origins of a crucial character, and follows Fever Crumb, a girl who is trained to be rational but who moves into an irrational world where she is under threat and finds her own identity. Reeve’s future is always inventively old-fashioned and historical rather than hi-tech: mobile phones are ancient artefacts, the engineering quasi-Victorian. He conveys big truths, while being witty and playful — monks in orange robes chant the name of an archaic deity, “Hari, Hari, Hari Potter”; and one London district is called St Kylie. The book is clever and moving, and the vocabulary, from “arquebus” to “ziggurat”, is rich (Scholastic £10.99)

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