Airborn - kenneth oppel

Now in paperback--a swashbuckling new fantasy by the bestselling author of the Silverwing trilogy.

In the early 20th century, a young orphan serves as a cabin boy aboard an airship and is witness to life-and-death battles in the sea and above land.

Sailing toward dawn, and I was perched atop the crows nest, being the ships eyes.

We were two nights out of Sydney, and thered been no weather to speak of so far.

I was keeping watch on a dark stack of nimbus clouds off to the northwest, but we were leaving it far behind, and it looked to be smooth going all the way back to Lionsgate City.

Like riding a cloud.

Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city.

It is the life Matts always wanted; convinced hes lighter than air, he imagines himself as buoyant as the hydrium gas that powers his ship.

One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies.

It is only after Matt meets the balloonists granddaughter that he realizes that the mans ravings may, in fact, have been true, and that the creatures are completely real and utterly mysterious.

In a swashbuckling adventure reminiscent of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Oppel, author of the best-selling Silverwing trilogy, creates an imagined world in which the air is populated by transcontinental voyagers, pirates, and beings never before dreamed of by the humans who sail the skies.