The City of Ember
Jeanne DuPrau, 2003
Science fiction Young adultFantasyContemporary fiction
In a city with no sky, two twelve-year-olds are handed jobs they didn't ask for and start asking why the lights keep going out.
Feels like dread, wonder and hope. About freedom, memory and war.
A page from the book
A city lit entirely by lamps, and the dark it can't explain.
In the city of Ember, the sky was always dark. The only light came from great floodlamps mounted on the buildings and at the tops of poles in the middle of the larger squares. When the lights were on, they cast a yellowish glow over the streets; people walking by threw long shadows that shortened and then stretched out again. When the lights were off, as they were between nine at night and six in the morning, the city was so dark that people might as well have been wearing blindfolds. Jeanne DuPrau.DuPrau worked for years as a teacher and an educational editor before The City of Ember, her first book for young readers, appeared in 2003.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The City of Ember like?
- Feels like dread, wonder and hope. About freedom, memory and war.
- What should I read after The City of Ember?
- If you liked The City of Ember, try Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), Between Shades of Gray (Ruta Sepetys) and A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle).
A taste of the feed
A man buys supplies for a disaster and grieves the ordinary world mid-aisle.
“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.
Station Eleven · Emily St. John Mandel
The morning a boy's life is priced, and the price fits in a pocket.
Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.
Between Shades of Gray · Ruta Sepetys
The moment a familiar body becomes something no myth has a name for.
The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen.
A Wrinkle in Time · Madeleine L'Engle
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