Heap House (Iremonger 1)

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Carey is a playwright, novelist and illustrator. He has worked for the theatre in London, Lithuania and Romania and with a shadow puppet master in Malaysia. He has written two illustrated novels for adults, OBSERVATORY MANSIONS and ALVA & IRVA, both translated into many different languages. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he wrote the Iremonger Trilogy because he missed feeling cold and gloomy.

REVIEWS
Edward Carey's HEAP HOUSE - delightful, eccentric, heartfelt, surprising, philosophical, everything that a novel for children should be.', Eleanor Catton, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2013

'Astonishing and inventive, it calls out to be read.', Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

'My favourite novel for children published this year was the marvelously funny and inventive HEAP HOUSE', The Guardian

'This inventive and continually surprising novel evokes a darkly distorted image of Victorian London which is at once frightening, grotesque and often very funny ... a peculiar but superbly-realised fantasy - the first book in what promises to be an excellent trilogy.', Booktrust - Books We Like

'A rare work of individual brilliance.', Inis magazine