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Railhead

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017!

Step Aboard – the Universe is Waiting. The Great Network is a place of drones and androids, Hive Monks and Station Angels. The place of the thousand gates, where sentient trains criss-cross the galaxy in a heartbeat. It is also a place of great dangers – especially for someone who rides the rails and rides his luck the way Zen Starling does. Once Zen was just a petty thief, stealing to support his family and living by his wits. Now everything has changed. Zen is still a thief – but it could be that the key to the whole universe rests on finding out what else he is . . .

Our Review Panel says...

I’m always amazed by the sheer scale of Philip Reeve’s imagination. Having created giant mobile cities in the Mortal Engines books, he turned to interstellar sci-fi for this story set in a multi-planetary universe linked by the Great Network, a web of wormholes travelled by huge, hyper-intelligent trains. The plot is wildly complicated but super exciting, drawing in everything from god-like computer brains to swarms of sentient insects, and Reeve’s writing is, as always, very sharp and funny.

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