On your 14th birthday, you're dead meat...

Chilling SF adventure from international bestselling author Garth Nix.

In a futuristic urban wasteland, evil Overlords have decreed that no child shall live a day past his fourteenth birthday. On that Sad Birthday, the child is the object of an obscene harvest resulting in the construction of a machinelike creature whose sole purpose is to kill.

The mysterious Shade - once a man, but now more like the machines he fights - recruits the few children fortunate enough to escape. With luck, cunning, and skill, four of Shade's children come closer than any to discovering the source of the Overlords' power - and the key to their downfall. But the closer the children get, the more ruthless Shade seems to become...

This book has been graded for interest at 12-16 years.

There are 352 pages in this book. This book was published 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers .

The two Australian authors, Anna Fienberg and Garth Nix, live in Sydney. Anna is known for her popular stories for all age groups. Garth is known for his teenage fantasy novels.