A Guardian Best Book of 2019
Selected for the national 2019 Summer Reading Challenge
Recommended by UNESCO as a book that brings the UN’s sustainable development goals to life
Selected as part of Empathy Lab’s 2021 Read for Empathy Collection
Shortlisted for the 2020 Northern Ireland Book Award
Editor’s Pick as a Best Debut Book in The School Librarian
An Observer Older Children’s Book of the Month

‘The very best fiction involves creating believable alternative worlds. Darren Simpson does just that in Scavengers (Usborne), his extraordinary first outing for young readers. The scavengers’ universe is made up of just two: young Landfill and old Bagaboo, who hide from an ill-defined enemy in an Eden Bagaboo has created out of detritus. Loving, but strict, Bagaboo has his own dialect and rules: chiefly, hide and obey. Landfill, though, makes a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries that seed doubt and rebellion, and the reader’s suspicions as to what is really happening gradually crystallise with a mixture of fascination and alarm. It’s a hugely compassionate, sophisticated novel, about inclusion and exclusion, and who – or what – is really crazy.’
Kitty Empire, The Guardian

‘A book unlike any other – I was totally unprepared for the twists!’
Alex Wheatle, Winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize

Scavengers is available from bookshop.org, your local bookshop and the usual online places.

If you’re a teacher, please help yourself to Usborne’s free Scavengers teaching resources. And if you’d like to take your pupils even deeper into the novel, check out Oxford University Press’s “Rollercoasters” edition, which is aimed specifically at the classroom, and includes student-friendly notes and exclusive insights.

For any questions about rights to the novel, please contact my literary agent, Laura Susijn of the The Susijn Agency, at info@thesusijnagency.com.