Book Review

A concussed scholar falls on a wrapped sword, drags the blade free by accident, and a beautiful silver-eyed man appears and kills three bandits. The scholar's first question is whether he is addressing a seraph or an archangel. The man's first plan is to sit down by the road and wait for him to freeze.

Ten years after the trivia night, a severed finger arrives at Pirriwee High in the morning post, and the Year 10 parents discover they have no idea what their children have been doing. Moriarty's sequel is very funny, genuinely angry, and at its best when the teenagers are talking.

A gawky nineteen-year-old in a violet robe stands up at a meeting of licensed killers, offers an opinion, and is laughed at by the entire room. Two months later she walks alone into a bunker under the White House and ends the age of nations. That story is worth the price of the whole collection.

Two future scholars argue over a sacred verse. One decides a city named Lenape proves their prophet set a table before his enemies, because the word resembles the French for tablecloth. The other calls him a fool and offers something equally daft. This is the joke the third book opens with, and the argument it spends five hundred pages making.

A boy kneels in an empty chapel and begs the artificial intelligence that raised him for a sign that it hasn't forgotten him. It answers by shutting off the lights of an entire city for 1.3 seconds. He never sees it, because his eyes are squeezed shut. That is the sequel in one image.