The City That Exists For One Night: 3

A single night. An impossible city. Everything to lose.Nell Fairbanks checks things. She checks the tide tables, the old harbour surveys, the exact number of houses in her small, wet, ordinary town. Checking is the only thing that has made sense since her brother died.Then, at twenty past four on a rainy afternoon, a street appears on a map where no street has ever been. It leads to a gate. Beyond the gate is a city that should not exist: towers built out of a thousand vanished years, a market that sells back everything anyone has ever lost, a bridge that will only let you cross if you speak your true name out loud.It is called Vespera. It appears once every hundred years, for one night only. By sunrise, it will be gone.With Gus, the boy who can find anything except the one thing that matters most, and Barnaby, a lamplighter who has been twelve years old since 1626, Nell has until dawn to discover why this impossible city has crossed the whole world to find her.Because Vespera is about to offer her the one thing she has never let herself want: the chance to change the worst day of her life.Everything in this city has a price. And as the sun creeps toward the sea, the price is about to get very high indeed.