Collection of four tales set in the world of Stuart and Riddell’s bestselling The Edge Chronicles. The Edge is a vast, floating island, over whose rocky edges waterfalls plummet into nothingness; a flat earth above which magnificent Sky Galleons clash in battle with pirates, monsters and other mysterious forces. It is also, more importantly, the set for Paul Stuart and Chris Riddell’s best-selling fantasy series, The Edge Chronicles.
Already spanning to nine books, across three trilogies (or sagas) charting the lives of three generations of the adventurous Verginix family, The Edge Chronicles is a complex and detailed epic, for which the Edge in itself provides a suitably vivid and well-imagined setting. Collected here are four tales from the Edge, telling stories from across the several generations of history the chronicles have so far described.
‘Cloud Wolf’ is the tale of a young Quint’s first battle in the sky, aboard the ship of his father, Wind Jackal; essentially a prequel to the Quint saga.
‘The Stone Pilot’ is the tale of Maugin, the mysterious creature who tends to the flight-rock at the sky-galleons heart, keeping the vast ship afloat. Like ’Cloud Wolf’, this novella was originally published as an exclusive World Book Day story.
’The Slaughterer’s Quest’ features Keris, the daughter of Twig (and hence granddaughter of Quint) as she attempts to uncover the truth about her fathers fate.
’The Blooding of Rufus Filiate’ is the first story to feature the title character, Rufus, a Freeglade Lancer, in what seems to be only the beginning of his adventures…
A fold-out timeline included in The Lost Barkscrolls handily recounts the history of the Edge and many readers will be familiar with the intervening episodes in the chronology, but it is nonetheless something of a mystery why these four particular stories should be included together here. There’s nothing really to connect the four stories, and while for the complete anorak, there’s something appealing about the idea of a book that taps into the depth of the longer series, for anyone else it can prove somewhat frustrating. These stories are pivotal, not to each other, but to the separate trilogies to which they form prequel, sequel or companion, and perhaps belong with the parent6 books, where their strengths would best be shown. But, at the end of the day, while the stories are not the best of the Edge Chronicles numerous instalments, they are of the consistently high quality the authors have set for the series thus far.