Heap House: The Iremonger Trilogy: Book One

"This is a marvelous, brilliant, un-put-down-able book that swings between dark whimsy and harrowing bleakness with dexterity and skill. At the very end of the grimy borough of Filching squats Heap House, home to the Iremonger family, uniquely suited to tending the Heaps — mountains of refuse and salvage so immense that they’ve created their own microclimate. Each Iremonger has a birth object, a seemingly random item to which he must always be near, lest he sicken and fade away. But why can Clodius Iremonger hear the birth objects speaking their own names? Why are those names so strange? And who has stolen Aunt Rosamud’s brass door handle?"