Stormchaser

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's Stormchaser is a wild, strange Edge Chronicles fantasy for 11 year olds about a floating city that's about to break loose.

What happens

Twig is in Undertown, a long way from the woodtroll village where he grew up. It's hot, filthy and noisy, and everyone's in a tearing hurry. You can almost smell it (tilder sausages, ripe cheese and boiling glue).

High above the streets floats Sanctaphrax, a city of scholars built on a rock. It's held down by chains. And the chains keep snapping.

In a grubby pet shop Twig finds an old friend locked in a tiny cage. It's the caterbird, who has watched over him since the day it hatched. Twig picks the lock. But he won't open the door until the bird tells him what's going wrong.

What follows is a brilliant story within the story. Twenty years ago an ambitious young apprentice called Vilnix Pompolnius stole a few crystals of stormphrax. That's pure lightning, and it's the only thing heavy enough to keep the rock from floating away. He ground it into a dust that turns the foulest water clean, and used it to grab power.

Now the city is stuck in a vicious circle. More chains mean more foundries, more foundries mean filthier water, and filthier water means more stolen stormphrax. Twig spells it out himself, which makes a tricky idea very easy to follow. Can anything fix it?

Then the book hops about the Edge in short scenes. A knight still alive inside his rusted armour. Vilnix admiring himself in a mirror (he has his initials stitched into his hair-shirt, which tells you all you need to know). A shady guide leading a goblin family into the Mire.

It's packed with weird and wonderful things. Prowlgrins, lapmufflers, a slaughterer with blood-red skin selling lucky charms. It's a world to get lost in.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Quite a few characters die in the first chapters. A falling chain crushes a stallholder, the stormphrax blast killed a whole room of apprentices, and the kind slaughterer from chapter one is killed by a second explosion. A pet-shop bird of prey leaves "guts everywhere". It's dark, but it's never gory for long.

Twig's story starts in Beyond the Deepwoods, and this one leans on it, so start there.

What to read next

If they enjoy the grimy city streets most of all, try Paul Stewart's Curse of the Night Wolf. Barnaby knows every alley of his city and runs across its rooftops. At the heart of it is a cure handed to a poor old coachman that seems too good to be true (be warned, its first pages are properly frightening).