China Miéville's Railsea has won the 2013 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Novel. I'm not surprised. Here are my quite brief thoughts on the novel, put down in some haste directly after reading it around this time last year:
Chewy prose. A really good adventure story. Great set pieces. The story's theme and structure mirror each other quite nicely. Damn good.
And here's the product description from Amazon.com:
On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death & the other’s glory. Spectacular as it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than the endless rails of the railsea—even if his captain thinks only of hunting the ivory-colored mole that took her arm years ago. But when they come across a wrecked train, Sham finds something—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—that leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters & salvage-scrabblers. & it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.
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