Attention Grabber #3: Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

Attention Grabber is my new weekly feature where I post what I think is a great opening paragraph to a book, the sort of opening that pulls young readers in and hooks them from the start.

This week's Attention Grabber comes from Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. It was suggested by a couple of other bloggers, but it is so great that I already had it on my list for this feature anyway. It is possibly one of the shortest Attention Grabbers that will appear on The Book Zone, but when I first read it I had one of those almost sit-com-like double takes just to check that I had read it correctly. How could anyone not read on after this first sentence?

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.