Happy New Year! Get 10% off all books on our website throughout January! Discount will be applied automatically at checkout.

Heap House (Iremonger 1)

from the author of The Times Book of the Year Little

Edward Carey author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Hot Key Books

Published:7th Aug '14

Should be back in stock very soon

Heap House (Iremonger 1) cover

'Delightful, eccentric, heartfelt, surprising, philosophical...' - Eleanor Catton

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.

'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.

Edward Carey's HEAP HOUSE - delightful, eccentric, heartfelt, surprising, philosophical, everything that a novel for children should be. * Eleanor Catton, winner of the Man Book Prize 2013 *
My favourite novel for children published this year was the marvelously funny and inventive HEAP HOUSE * The Guardian *
Astonishing and inventive, it calls out to be read. -- Nicolette Jones * The Sunday Times *
Dark and wildly original urban fantasy tale. * The New York Times *
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 *

ISBN: 9781471401596

Dimensions: 196mm x 129mm x 28mm

Weight: 286g

416 pages