Description
So what are you saying, Josh?’ Lindsay asked me, ‘that there’s a secret Roman town down here where people speak Latin and which nobody knows about in the world we come from?’
This extraordinary, highly imaginative, hugely entertaining novel tells the story of fifteen-year-old Josh Moonford, his younger twin brother and sister Sam and Dora, Cornish girl Lindsay Penhaligon, warm-hearted gang leader Troy Wilson and arrogant sixth-former (and self-proclaimed genius) Declan Jacques, and their mind-blowing adventure in the underground high-tech Roman world of Cantia, located beneath the famous cathedral city of Canterbury.
Can Josh and his friends – aided by the world-famous movie star Carlo Clancy – end the brutal Cantian revolution that could lead to disaster for our world?
About the Author:
James Essinger was born in Leicester in 1957 and has lived in Canterbury in Kent since 1986. He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys, Leicester, and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read English Language and Literature. He spent much of his time between 1981 and 1983 teaching English in Finland before working in public relations in London and then in Canterbury. Since 1988, James has been a professional writer.
His non-fiction books include Jacquard’s Web (2004), Ada’s Algorithm (2013), which is to be filmed by Monumental Pictures, and Charles and Ada: the computer’s most passionate partnership (2019) His novels include The Mating Game (2016) with Jovanka Houska, the film rights of which have been optioned, Rollercoaster (2019) and The Ada Lovelace Project (forthcoming in 2020).
James is the principal of The Conrad Press, which he founded in December 2015.
James Taylor –
‘Josh Moonford and the Lost City of Cantia’ may be categorised as ‘Young Adult Fiction’, but I’m forty – and can therefore only very loosely be described as a ‘young adult’ – and I enjoyed it tremendously.
Very crudely summarised, it’s about a group of children and teenagers – led by the 16-year-old Josh Moonford – who find themselves in Cantia, a surreal, fascinating and deeply unsettling underground city hidden beneath Canterbury. Cantians still speak Latin and live like Ancient Romans, although some of their technology is way ahead of ours.
For reasons I won’t go into (as I don’t do spoilers), Josh and his followers find themselves in a race against time not only to get out of Cantia alive, but to thwart a revolution that could spell disaster for the whole world.
Yet this isn’t just a riveting, action-packed fantasy novel. It also brings to life the thrill, tenderness and pathos of young love, while the portrayal of Cantia vividly evokes the baffling contradiction at the heart of Ancient Roman culture, which was both ultra-civilised and barbarically cruel (although the novel’s bloodier scenes are never tasteless or gratuitous).
In short, this book has a bit of everything: romance, horror, action, comedy (not least the dubious delights of Cantian gastronomy), coming-of-age drama – and a heroic giant millipede. What more could you want?