Floodland

Product Information

Even though it takes so many years for an island to completely sink, I noticed that if we don't have any interest on global warming, things will go much faster than we expected. His first book, Floodland, was published by Orion in 2000, and won the Branford-Boase award for best debut children's novel.

A middle-grade short novel about a post-global-warming world in which much of what was England is now under water. She is fortunate to uncover a small rowboat submerged in the mud, and fixes it up so she can escape her town and find her parents. The doom that prevails is beautifully crafted as is the glimmer of hope that pulls us through the book with its magnetism.It felt like it could have been fleshed out much more than it was; honestly it reads more like an outline of a story rather than the finished product. Entirely deserving of the Branford Boase Award, Floodland is a stunning debut novel that precluded more literary brilliance to follow.

Set in the near future on the east coast of England that has been reclaimed by the sea it tells the story of a girl who, having been mistakenly left behind by her parents escaping from the flood, she heads off to find them but ends up in the hands of a mob of nasty men on a small island.

I love Marcus Sedgwick and his writing style and this being his debut novel was clearly a stepping stone for his future work to come.

No ship was coming to the island for food or taking people or anything, and the last ship that carried people was away with her parents. Put this together with the feral survival of the children on the Island of Eels and you have Floodland. Sedgwick had obviously been influenced by William Blake’s ideas of how we have the power within ourselves and our imaginations to build a society that is for the good of all, or one that is destructive and selfish. I think it would have been better if it showed how Zoe and Munchkin got along and about them having their baby brother.She finds her way to Eel Island, a place where mobs rule in a bid for survival in a dark, dank graveyard of a world. I am teaching this to my year 6 class and it has been a great success as it totally engages its readers and is topical and relevant. Other notable award winning books include Floodland, Marcus’ first novel, which won the Branford-Boase Award in 2001, a prize for the best debut novel for children published in the UK each year; My Swordhand is Singing, which won the Booktrust Teenage Prize for 2007, and Lunatics and Luck, part of The Raven Mysteries series, which won a Blue Peter Book Award in 2011.