The Descenders

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's The Descenders is the thirteenth Edge Chronicles book, an epic and properly perilous adventure for 11 year olds about the climbers who go down over the edge of the world.

What happens

Cade Quarter has fled Great Glade and made a home in a lakeside cabin. His most precious thing is an old brass spyglass engraved N.Q. It was Nate Quarter's. He's Cade's uncle and the greatest Descender of them all, and Cade has never met him.

As Cade cleans and polishes that spyglass, the book slips back in time. We follow Nate on his descents down the vast cliff at the Edge, rope by rope and ledge by ledge, into places nobody has ever seen.

And those chapters are gripping. Each new descent goes deeper and costs more. There are storms of stinging lights called glisters. There are skeletal Edge wraiths and ravine demons with fingers twice as long as their bodies. Nate ties a knot in his scarf for every descent, and you find yourself counting them.

It's a clever way to tell it. Cade doesn't know what happened on his uncle's last descent, and neither do you. You piece it together alongside him, with one ear on the skytavern sailing towards Cade's lake with somebody on board who's come specially to find him.

Be aware that this one is dark in places, even for this shelf. Descenders die on the page. Their equipment fails, they fall screaming into the void, and Nate watches through the spyglass as one of them goes. The glister storm drives one climber out of his mind. There's grief in the backstory too. Cade lost his mother as a baby, and his father was murdered on the orders of the villain, Quove Lentis. None of it is gory, but it's intense.

For a confident older reader who loves big fantasy worlds and doesn't mind a bit of danger, it's a real treat. The world is so strange and so detailed (lufwood fires, phrax crystals, floating cities) that it's easy to get lost in it.

It sits very late in a long series. It will make most sense to someone who already knows the Edge.

What to read next

So if they're new to it, why not go back to Beyond the Deepwoods? It starts in a woodtroll cabin, with a boy called Twig who has always known he's different, and there's a whole world to discover from there.