The Mending House at the Bottom of the Stairs

About this book

Under the mountain called Old Hob, four thousand steps spiral down to the town of Lowly Stair, where silver-eyed people see in the dark and are blinded by daylight. Hettie Cobb, eleven, small and surface-born, falls into their world one rainy night after running from the Gant Street Home for Girls, where she was a nuisance every day of her life. She cannot see the steps. She cannot see the faces. She needs a candle in a town that forbids flame. Told backwards from the night twelve-year-old Hettie, a glowing moth on her shoulder, climbs to rescue another lost child, this is the story of how a girl nobody wanted found a cross old healer, a loud snail-herder, a grumbling postman and a moth that cannot fly. But what did it cost, and what was she willing to give up to keep the Deep warm?