Mortal Engines (The Hungry City Chronicles, #1)

by Philip Reeve

Like most Londoners, Tom was horrified by the idea that people still actually lived on the bare earth.

She liked his soft voice, and the strange laugh that always sounded as if he were trying it on for size, as if he had never had much call for laughter down in the Deep Gut.

Strange, how when he lived there he had believed everything the Goggle-screens told him about the city’s elegant lines, its perfect beauty. Now he saw that it was ugly; no better than any other town, just bigger: a storm front of smoke and belching chimneys, a wave of darkness rolling toward the mountains with the white villas of High London surfing on its crest like some delicate ship. It didn’t look like home.