Fly By Night

When 12-year-old Mosca Mye burns down her uncle’s mill (accidentally or on purpose?), it is time for her to leave the village of Clough and seek her fortune with storyteller, poet and petty crook Eponymous Clent. On their arrival in the capital, Mandelion, where political intrigue is rife, the pair become spies but are they on the same side? And is anything as it seems in this ‘Fractured Realm’?

A thrilling adventure mystery set in an ‘unhistorical’ and seamy 18th century, Hardinge’s richly intricate world fizzes with larger than life characters, gaming, coffee houses (inventively housed on boats that sail off in times of trouble), an underground Ragged School and an illicit printing press not to speak of a marriage house and household gods who keep flies out of jam. There is something of Dickens in her awesomely complicated (sometimes overly complicated) plotting but where she really excels is in her vigorously descriptive prose which can even animate the natural world: thus, ‘the hills which had been sunning themselves like so many contented dogs closed in, black and ragged as wolves’.

One of the themes of this many layered and vivacious first novel is the power of words – it is love of words that draws the (unusually for a village girl) literate Mosca to the poet Clent, and words that enable her to become a spy. In the city of Mandelion words have a power of their own for good or for ill.