Brilliant, beautiful...as unpredictable as the sea itself. --Philip Reeve, author of The Mortal Engines

Harshly beautiful, and stark with near-despair, this is an unsettling, deeply original historical novel. --The Guardian

This is the best book I've read this year. Extraordinary...--Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Girl of Ink and Stars

Everything Geraldine McCaughrean touches turns to gold. --The Sunday Times

One of the most immersive and compelling works of fiction we've read in quite some time... Suffice it to say that the novel is rounded off with consummate skill and the result is an outstanding example of the storyteller's art. --Undiscovered Scotland

Winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2018. Every summer Quill and his friends are put ashore on a remote sea stac to hunt birds. But this summer, no one arrives to take them home. Surely nothing but the end of the world can explain why they've been abandoned - cold, starving and clinging to life, in the grip of a murderous ocean. How will they survive?