The Iremonger Trilogy Books in Order

The Iremonger books are set in a warped, soot-dark version of London where rubbish is power. The Iremonger family has made its fortune from the Heaps, great shifting mountains of discarded things gathered from across the city. At the center stands Heap House, a huge patched-together mansion built from salvaged pieces, all stairways, corners, secrets, and rats. From the start, the series treats objects as more than background clutter. They carry memory, status, and menace.

At the heart of the trilogy are Clod Iremonger and Lucy Pennant. Clod is a sickly, awkward boy from the ruling family who can hear objects whisper. Every Iremonger is bound to a birth object for life, and Clod's strange gift makes him both useful and suspect inside his own household. Lucy arrives from the outside as an orphaned servant, sharp-eyed, stubborn, and much less willing to accept the family's rules. Together they give the books their emotional center, one child trying to understand the system from inside, the other refusing to be crushed by it from below.

Nothing in these books stays quietly in the background.

In Heap House, the story is tightly wound around the family home and the dark machinery that keeps the Iremonger empire running. In Foulsham, the world gets bigger and dirtier as Clod and Lucy are separated, transformed, and forced to survive among the people who live under the family's power. By Lungdon, the trouble has spilled into the capital itself, with disappearances, moving objects, deepening darkness, and panic spreading through the city. The series keeps widening its lens, from house, to borough, to London, without losing track of the two young people at its core.

The setting does a lot of the work here. Carey writes the Heaps, the slums of Foulsham, and the diseased grandeur of Lungdon as places you can almost smell. There is grime, rot, smoke, damp, and endless castoff stuff, but there is also wit. The books are gothic and unsettling, but also playful, sometimes funny, and often surprisingly warm. Carey's own illustrations add to that feeling. They make the strange names, severe faces, and unnerving objects feel even more real.

What carries across all three books is the question of what people and things are worth. The Iremongers treat both as usable, tradable, and disposable. Clod and Lucy keep pushing against that logic. So the trilogy works as an adventure story, a family nightmare, and a sharp class fable at the same time. If you like middle grade or YA fantasy with Dickensian atmosphere, odd humor, and a real ache underneath the weirdness, this is what to expect.