Lungdon: Book Three (The Iremonger Trilogy)

"This wildly original trilogy is set in a fantasy London of the 1870s, where a family called Iremonger ministers to the heaps of city trash. Each Iremonger is assigned a “birth-object” that must never leave his or her person: Clodius Iremonger, for instance, has a bath plug, while his betrothed, Pinalippy, has a doily, and so on. Beginning with the mystery of why Clod can hear birth-objects speaking names, each volume expands into the next like nesting dolls: Heap House grows into Foulsham which grows into Lungdon, house to borough to city. A magnificently engrossing indictment of our late capitalist modernity."