After a long break, I'm returning to the world of my first book, Mortal Engines. Thunder City takes place around a century before the original story, and features an entirely new cast of characters. There are adventures in the lethal Amusement Arcade of Margate, aboard a flying spa town, in the depths of Paris, and among the lava fields of the north. Please pre-order it if you can (and from your local bookshop if you have one)! Here's a little piece about it on my blog, and I'll be talking about it in more detail before publication in September.
Thunder City will be published by Scholastic in the UK and US.
Pre-Order Now!
I was born in Brighton in 1966. After leaving school I trained as an illustrator, and worked for many years providing cartoons and illustrations for the Horrible Histories and Murderous Maths books. My first novel, the epic Mortal Engines, was published in 2001. It went on to win the Smarties and Blue Peter prizes, and a movie, directed by Christian Rivers and produced by Peter Jackson, was released in 2018.
Mortal Engines was followed by three sequels - Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain - and three prequels; Fever Crumb, A Web of Air, and Scrivener’s Moon. A collection of related short stories, Night Flights, with illustrations by Ian McQue, was published in 2018, along with The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, co-written with Jeremy Levett and featuring artwork by an array of illustrators...
Continue readingIt was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea…
My first published novel, Mortal Engines is an adventure set in a far-off future where predatory cities rumble about on wheels and merchant airships ply the skies. Three sequels continue the story - Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain. Later I returned to the same world but in an earlier era for a prequel series - Fever Crumb, A Web of Air and Scrivener's Moon. (I'd recommend reading them in the order they were written, starting with the four Mortal Engines books, and moving on to Fever Crumb.) The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines is a lavishly illustrated encyclopaedia & history of the Traction Era which I do-wrote with Jeremy Levett, and Night Flights contains three short stories, with wonderful illustrations by Ian McQue, who also created the cover art for the series.
Cover artwork by Ian McQue
2002 Gold Award Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for 9 to 11 years
2003 Blue Peter Book Award: The Book I Couldn't Put Down
2006 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize
2007 L.A. Times Book Prize Young Adult Literature
The Utterly Dark trilogy is now complete (although I'm hoping to return to Wildsea and the Autumn Isles in future). Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time takes Utterly on a journey that leads her through time to the beginning and end of the Earth, and to Wildsea in the 1970s - a chance to draw directly on the memories of childhood beach adventures which were what partly inspired these books in the first place. There are adventures, too, for Egg, Will, Aish and the rest of the ensemble cast from the previous books - a nice mix of children and adults, so hopefully there's something for everyone! This series has been a joy to write, I do hope you'll read them.
Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time and the other books in this series, Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep and Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild are published in the UK by David Fickling Books.
Cover artwork by Paddy Donnelly
Sarah McIntyre and I have now published four books about the Adventuremice: Otter Chaos, Mermouse Mystery, Mice on the Ice, and the latest,Mice on the Moon. They're all lavishly illustrated with Sarah's glorious watercolour illustrations, and we've had a great response from young readers, teachers, booksellers, and librarians. We're working on two more titles at the moment, and there are all manner of Adventuremice quizzes, drawing guides, games, and teaching resources on our website, Adventuremice.com. You can even buy some of Sarah's original artwork!.
The Adventuremice books are published by David Fickling Books in the UK
Cover artwork by Sarah McIntyre
I've made a movie! Sarah Reeve and I shot this in 2022/3, using some of our local landscapes here on Dartmoor and a cast of friends and neighbours as well as professional actors Laura Frances Martin, Joanna Neary, Jonny Hibbs, and Arran Hawkins. There's even a brief cameo from Lord of the Rings illustrator Alan Lee, whose illustrations helped to spark my interest in Arthurian legend. Gwenevere tells the story of the fallen queen's journey into exile after the fall of the Round Table, and of a supernatural peril she encounters on the way. It's 34 minutes long, was made with a lot of love and very little money, and you can watch it on YouTube.
These books were my return to grand-scale world-building after a few years away. They'e in a similar scale to Mortal Engines, but instead of a ramshackle retro-future they'e set among the glittering hi-tech cities and terraformed garden planets of the Network Empire, an interstellar society built around a vast system of hyperspace railways. Hired to pull of a heist far more dangerous than he expected, petty thief Zen Starling is plunged into an adventure involving sentient trains, secret stations, sensitive androids, fickle data-gods, chatty insect colonies - so many things, in fact, that the story spilled over into two more books, Black Light Express and Station Zero. I was aiming for the exotic fun of classic space opera, but with trains instead of spaceships…
Published in the UK by Oxford University Press, and in the US by Switch Press.
"Zen's world is hauntingly evoked in all its technological beauty. A futuristic vision that enthralls and chills." - The Financial Times.
"…the emotions of the characters (even the robot who wants freckles) draw you in wholeheartedly. Railhead is superb." - Martin Chilton, The Daily Telegraph.
Cover artwork by Ian McQue
My favourite book when I was growing up was The Lord of the Rings, but I always felt a bit sorry for the goblins and orcs - why did they always have to be the baddies? So here's my fantasy trilogy, in which the goblins get to be the heroes for a change. The ruined city of Clovenstone where my goblins rub shoulders with trolls, giants, and other legendary creatures, is also slightly based on Dartmoor, where I live. Considerably goofier than the Mortal Engines or Railhead books, I hope Goblins, Goblins vs Dwarves, and Goblin Quest will appeal to fantasy fans of 7 and up.
Cover artwork by Jonny Duddle
I've always been fascinated by the Arthurian legends, so once I'd finished the first four Mortal Engines books it seemed natural to try and write a King Arthur story. The problem was, it had been done so often - how could I do something distinctive? The answer turned out to be a sort of anti-legend: in post-Roman Britain a girl named Gwyna falls in with the warlord Arthur and becomes apprentice to his wily spin-doctor Myrddin: together they spin the stories which will turn Arthur's shabby exploits into a legend that will echo down the ages… Here Lies Arthur is my only non-fantasy book to date, although as it's set in the Dark Ages it's still basically a made-up world. It won the prestigious Carnegie Medal in 2008. Published in the UK by Scholastic
'Reeve is a terrific writer and at times this novel packs real emotional heft and more than a little adult sensibility.'
Toby Clements, The Times
Cover artwork by Ian McQue
2008 Carnegie Medal
Bogged down in the early drafts of the epic Fever Crumb, I decided to clear my head by setting it aside and writing a shorter, simpler book. The result is No Such Thing As Dragons. Brock and his apprentice Anselm are dragon hunters, travelling from town to town through the mediaeval Alps, promising to slay the monsters which the villagers believe live on the heights. Of course, Brock knows that there are no such things as dragons… until he arrives at the Drachenburg, and discovers that there just might be. It's basically Jaws up a mountain, and I thought up the whole story on a walk up the Old Man of Coniston.
Published in the UK by Scholastic
'Full of adventure, humour and invention' Charlie Higson
Cover artwork by Ian McQue
From the author of the international blockbuster Mortal Engines, adapted by visionary Peter Jackson, Larklight is an utterly unique and page-turningly brilliant Victorian space adventure
Art Mumby is just a normal boy living in space, but all that changes when an ancient race of gigantic white spiders called the First Ones arrive to seize his family home, Larklight.
Forced to flee, Art and his annoying sister Myrtle are chased across the galaxy, from the fiery rivers of Mars to the distant rings of Saturn. But the First Ones have trouble on their hands. They don't bank on Art falling in with Jack Havock and a motley crew of notorious space pirates…
Cover artwork by David Wyatt
When I met author and illustrator Sarah McIntyre, we got on so well together that we decided we decided to collaborate on some joint projects. Together we create funny adventure stories aimed at readers who want more text than a picture book provides, but would still like lots and lots of pictures. Oliver and the Seawigs, Pugs of the Frozen North, Cakes in Space, Jinks and O'Hare, Funfair Repair, and three books (soon to be four) about Kevin, the Roly Poly Flying Pony. They work well for kids aged 7 - 10 (though they're also good read-aloud stories for younger ones) and they've been very popular with schools. Sarah and I come up with the stories and ideas together, then I write the text and Sarah draws the pictures - but we help each other out if we get stuck.
Visit https://www.jabberworks.co.uk/ for fun, free activities and videos for each book from this fantastic double act!
Thunder City has been out in the world for a week now. Here’s a nice review by Sam Creighton. And here’s another from Through the Bookshelf. If you’ve read the book and like it, please do add a review on Amazon or whichever social media sit…
Read MoreFor obvious reasons I approve of both stories about imaginary cities and old men blowing their savings on self-funded movies, so I felt obliged to go and see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis despite the decidedly patchy reviews. And much to my surpri…
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