The Winter Knights

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's The Winter Knights is a snowbound fantasy for 11 year olds about a sky pirate's son trying to earn a place at the grandest academy in a floating city.

What happens

Quint is the son of the sky pirate captain Wind Jackal. He's been apprentice to the most important scholar in Sanctaphrax, a city of towers perched on a floating rock. This isn't the start of Quint's story, and the book opens with a short catch-up so nobody's lost.

Then, in the very first chapter, a bell tolls and a vast flock of white ravens fills the sky. Quint's mentor is dead.

Without a sponsor, Quint is sure his dream of the Knights Academy is over and he'll be off with his father on the sky ship. Until the city's two new rulers send for him. He's in, alongside Vilnix, a sneering knife-grinder's lad, and Phin, who is friendly from his first sentence. Meanwhile his friend Maris, the dead scholar's daughter, has been carted off to the town below by relatives nobody likes the look of. And it won't stop snowing.

The world is the real star here. Sanctaphrax is full of noise, because every school in it measures the weather. There are spinning pinwheels, clattering hail-weights and glass rain bottles clinking on their hooks. It's said a blind person could never get lost in the city just by listening. The names are brilliant too (ratbirds, mobgnomes and a glassy spindlebug called Tweezel), and the grown-ups are all scheming against each other.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There's a lot of grief early on. The funeral is described plainly, and the body is left on a great stone stack for the white ravens to eat. Quint also remembers losing his mother and brothers in a fire when he was very small.

A reader who's recently lost someone might find those chapters hard going. But if yours loves a huge invented world with its own creatures, weather and politics, and doesn't mind a bit of darkness with it, there's a LOT here to get lost in.

The sentences are long and the made-up words come thick and fast, so it suits a confident reader. It's the kind of book you sink into rather than skim.

What to read next

If they're hooked on this world, Beyond the Deepwoods is set in it too. Twig has grown up in a cabin among the woodtrolls, and he's always known he doesn't quite belong.