Philip Reeve's intricate imagination makes J K Rowling feel like Enid Blyton, but he is as adept as she is at creating likeable characters, subtle villains and situations where good is hard to sort from evil.

Fever Crumb takes place after an apocalyptic end to civilisation. The North Sea is a desert and wheeled land-ships trundle around Europe. All trade centres around archaeology, as the survivors of Armageddon try to understand the purpose of the mangled remains of our machines, and a markedly medieval civic framework operates.

Reeve's vividly pictorial writing is becoming ever more accomplished and fluent. I enjoyed his plays on London place names (Pickled Eel Circus, Hampster's Heath) and shuddered at the sinister robot paperboys. There is always method in his madness: this is a book about establishing identity, being true to yourself, and keeping children, the only hopes of the future, safe.

In college many of the short stories I wrote were fairly dark but I’d always heard the advice that you should write what you read and at the time I loved to read romantic comedies and chick lit. So when I decided to attempt a novel, that’s what I tried to write even though it didn’t fit my natural tone. In fact, when I first tried to write a romantic comedy I had to constantly pull myself away from writing dark (and the reason I never tried to sell that book is because too many characters die which wasn’t very comedic!). Even the young adult chick lit I was working on tended to be dark--the main character interned at a coroners office and was surrounded by death.

So writing The Forest of Hands and Teeth was more of me embracing my true voice. I think I’d been scared to just indulge in it before, afraid that there wouldn’t be a market for it (and in fact, even when I was writing The Forest of Hands and Teeth I was convinced it wasn’t saleable). As soon as I jotted down the first line I decided to write it the way I wanted--to experiment and push the bounds and not worry about the market or what other people would think. This was the story I realized I had to tell when my fiancé suggested, “write what you love.”

• Review by Louise France - The Observer

In this compelling thriller, currently riding high in the bestseller charts, Stieg Larsson brilliantly reinvents the Nordic detective. First, his hero is Lisbeth Salander, a tattooed, pierced, vengeful, bisexual misfit. Second, she's not actually a detective, but a mathematics-obsessed computer hacker. Suddenly, the male preserve of Swedish crime fiction seems strangely quaint and middle aged. It has been infiltrated by an exotic new heroine, part Lara Croft superhero, part disdainful twentysomething.

This is the second in Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy of novels. We first met Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, in which she teamed up with Mikael Blomkvist, a liberal-leaning investigative journalist who was delving into the morally bankrupt world of big business.