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Neverwhere

Book Synopsis

Neverwhere is the stunningly original first novel from Neil Gaiman, the bestselling and prizewinning author of The Ocean at the End of the Lane and American Gods . Wired called it ‘the sort of book Terry Pratchett might produce if he spent a month locked in a cellar with Frank Kafka’. This is a must-read for all those who loved Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell or the magical world of J.K. Rowling.

Under the streets of London there’s a world most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, and pale girls in black velvet. Richard Mayhew is a young businessman who is about to find out more than he bargained for about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his safe and predictable life and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and yet utterly bizarre. There’s a girl named Door, an Angel called Islington, an Earl who holds Court on the carriage of a Tube train, a Beast in a labyrinth, and dangers and delights beyond imagining . . . And Richard, who only wants to go home, is to find a strange destiny waiting for him below the streets of his native city.

Our Review Panel says...

A secret world beneath London’s streets, where the names of tube stations take on mythic significance – the Angel of Islington, the Earl of Earls Court, the treacherous Knight’s Bridge – the world of Neverwhere drips with imagination. After helping a wounded girl called Door, ordinary Richard Mayhew finds himself stranded in London Below, and forced to go on a quest deep into the city’s underbelly to get his life back. The everyday world of the rattling Underground trains becomes something truly magical here. I was obsessed with it as a young reader.

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