DustRoad

Tom Huddleston's DustRoad is a big, fast adventure for 11 year olds about two kids from a drowned London who end up lost on the far side of the ocean.

What happens

Kara and Joe dive for salvage in the flooded city. Kara is sixteen and fierce. Joe is eleven (or so he reckons) and endlessly cheerful. They've already lived through a great deal before page one, including a flood, a deadly attack and a night on a submarine, and the story fills you in as it goes.

When a group of Mariners arrives to take the prisoner John Cortez away to face trial in their own country, Kara doesn't trust them one bit. So she and Joe go along to keep watch, aboard the Neptune, a ship so vast it's a floating town.

Then a storm hits. Pirate boats attack with rockets and rifles, and Joe is swept into the sea. Kara jumps in after him.

What happens next is some of the best stuff in the book. Three kids drift for days in clever Mariner life jackets that puff up, filter seawater and push you along with a little propeller. Kara grumps, Joe looks on the bright side, and eventually they wade ashore past a broken rollercoaster and a huge cartoon head with round black ears. (Your reader may well work out where they are before the characters do!)

Running alongside is a very different story. In a ruined Houston, a gang of teenage drivers called the Wildcats work for The Five, identical brothers who finish each other's sentences in a truly creepy way. Something big is being planned out in the desert.

It's a world of cars welded together from scrap, oceans that have swallowed cities and a continent that went dark long ago. Readers who like their adventures loud and cinematic will lap it up.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There's a lot of real violence, even for this shelf. People shoot at the children, rockets tear into the ship, and Kara loses her temper, hits a man and grips his throat until there's blood on his lips. She scares herself with how angry she gets, and the book takes that seriously. A reader who's happy with action films should be fine. A more sensitive one might want to wait.

What to read next

Hooked on stories about a world gone wrong? Where the World Turns Wild has Juniper looking after her little brother Bear in a walled city where trees, flowers and animals are all forbidden.