The Nameless One

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's The Nameless One is a dark, gripping sky-ship adventure for 11 year olds about a boy who has to leave his city or die.

What happens

Cade Quarter has no ticket and no money, so he joins the desperate at the top of a gantry known as the Forlorn Hope. The idea is to run down a sloping ramp and leap for the underside of a huge flying ship as it passes. Not everybody makes it.

Cade is hauled in through a porthole, straight into the Depths, the lowest and smelliest decks. Down there, a pale boy about his own age in green-tinted goggles runs things. His name is Drax Adereth, and he gives Cade a week to steal something valuable from the rich passengers upstairs. Or pay some other way. There's a glass bowl on his cabinet that turns out to be full of dried fingers.

Why is Cade running? His father woke him in the night and told him to pack. A powerful academy wants revenge on anyone connected to the uncle Cade has never even met. So now he's alone on a three-week voyage, surrounded by thieves.

The ship is enormous and it feels like a floating city. There are woodtrolls who refuse to hand over their hatchets, goblin families cooking gruel, rich merchants in silk up top and cutthroats in the dark below. There are LOTS of made-up words (phraxbarges, tilderskin, prowlgrins), but your reader will soak them up quickly.

And there's warmth in the middle of all the menace. A retired soldier is carrying forty eggs to start a new life, and one of them hatches. Cade names the pup Rumblix and feeds him his breakfast (he's a nipper).

A word of warning. It opens with several of the jumpers falling to their deaths, and the huge, friendly cloddertrog who helped Cade being clubbed off the ship. The bowl of fingers is exactly as horrible as it sounds. For older readers that's part of the thrill, but a reader who's easily spooked might find it grim.

What to read next

If they love it, they'll probably want to explore more of this world. Beyond the Deepwoods takes place in the same forests, where a boy called Twig has grown up among the woodtrolls knowing he's different.