Predator’s Gold

Philip Reeve's Predator's Gold is a chilly airship adventure for 11 year olds that takes the Mortal Engines story up into the ice of the far north.

What happens

It opens with Freya. She's a young girl in charge of a whole city, Anchorage, which skims across the ice on its engines. Her servants are all dead, her palace is thick with dust and she can't work out how to make the shower run hot.

Everyone wants her to decide where the city should go. Her decision is a big one. She's taking it somewhere nobody would expect.

Then we catch up with Tom and Hester, a couple of years older and flying a little red airship called the Jenny Haniver. They're scraping a living as traders. In a floating market town they run into Piotr Masgard, a big, swaggering hunter from the predator city of Arkangel. He's offering gold to anyone who'll tell him where the smaller ice cities are heading (that's the gold in the title).

And then there's Professor Pennyroyal. He wants a lift south, he's famous (he says so himself), and he never stops talking. Hester can't stand him. Tom thinks he's wonderful.

He's SO much fun to read. He tells a long, thrilling story about his travels across a land everyone thinks is dead, and you're never quite sure how much of it is true. Meanwhile a man he owes a lot of money to is busy on the radio, selling news of where the Jenny Haniver has gone.

Before long a flight of white warships is hunting them across the mountains. Tom's escape (straight through the middle of a moving city!) is a properly brilliant chase.

This one carries straight on from Mortal Engines and gives away how that book ends in its first chapters. So start there if you can.

Be aware that it's written for the very top of this shelf. Freya's servants and her mother have all died before the story starts. Rockets hit the airship, a pursuing ship smashes up inside the city and the professor is knocked out cold. Masgard mocks Hester's scarred face to her face, which is hard to read. Tom is nearly eighteen, and there's some kissing.

If your reader loved the first book, this is bigger, colder and funnier.

What to read next

For another adventure that starts somewhere lonely up in the sky, try Philip Reeve's Larklight. Art lives in a creaky old house spinning past the Moon, and in his very first sentence he's remembering running for his life and helping to man a cannon.