Heap House (Iremonger 1)
from the author of The Times Book of the Year Little
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- 5,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
'Roald Dahl by way of Charles Dickens' - Vox.com
'Dark and wildly original urban fantasy tale' - The New York Times
'Delightful, eccentric, heartfelt, surprising, philosophical, everything that a novel for children should be' - Eleanor Catton, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2013
'A rare work of individual brilliance' - Inis magazine
The Iremongers have taken up what was not wanted and wanted it.
Clod is an Iremonger. He lives in the Heaps, a vast sea of lost and discarded items collected from all over London. At the centre is Heap House, a puzzle of houses, castles, homes and mysteries reclaimed from the city and built into a living maze of staircases and scurrying rats. The Iremongers are a mean and cruel family, robust and hardworking, but Clod has an illness. He can hear the objects whispering. His birth object, a universal bath plug, says 'James Henry', Cousin Tummis's tap is squeaking 'Hilary Evelyn Ward-Jackson' and something in the attic is shouting 'Robert Burrington' and it sounds angry.
A storm is brewing over Heap House. The Iremongers are growing restless and the whispers are getting louder. When Clod meets Lucy Pennant, a girl newly arrived from the city, everything changes. The secrets that bind Heap House together begin to unravel to reveal a dark truth that threatens to destroy Clod's world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1875, Carey's delightful variation on Mervyn Peake's classic Gormenghast books features young Clod Iremonger, sickly scion of an eccentric family that has grown rich off of the trash heaps of London. Heap House itself is a mad conglomeration of building fragments attached willy-nilly to the original mansion located amid dangerous, ever-shifting Heaps. All Iremongers possess birth objects, such as a sink plug or a mustache cup, which they must never lose on pain of death or transformation; Clod is considered odd even by his relatives because he can hear each birth object speak its name. When orphan Lucy Pennant comes to Heap House as a servant, things become even stranger for Clod and his fellow Iremongers. Birth objects and other bits of the house grow restless, moving about on their own, and Clod finds himself falling in love. Full of strange magic, sly humor, and odd, melancholy characters, this trilogy opener, peppered with portraits illustrated by Carey in a style reminiscent of Peake's own, should appeal to ambitious readers seeking richly imagined and more-than-a-little-sinister fantasy. Ages 10 up.
