Who needs friends when you've got MONSTERS?

Everything was happening so fast and it was all so . . . mad. It was as if someone had taken reality, made it into a jigsaw, thrown the jigsaw on to the floor and then said, 'Now, hurry up and put it all together!' as they danced all over the jigsaw pieces in a clown suit, blowing a trumpet.

When Nelson's beloved big sister goes missing on a school trip, Nelson is devastated - he's not that good at making friends, and his sister is the only person he can talk to. His parents join the search party and leave Nelson in the care of his mad Uncle Pogo. Uncle Pogo is the caretaker of St Paul's Cathedral, and it is here that Nelson stumbles across a machine invented by Christopher Wren and buried for hundreds of years. Designed to extract the seven deadly sins, the machine had a fault - once extracted, the sins became living, breathing monsters who would then follow the sinner around for eternity (unless they ate him first, in the case of the particularly sinful). Nelson accidentally extracts seven deadly monsters from his own little soul. Ugly, cantankerous, smelly and often the cause of much embarrassment, Nelson's monsters are the last thing he needed in his life, but at least they're fairly harmless (he's a pretty good kid, on the whole). When he learns of their individual powers, he realizes the monsters can be put to good use, and together Nelson and the Deadly 7 set out on a quest across the globe to find and rescue his big sister. Somewhere along the way, Nelson realizes that he finally has friends, even if they are smelly, lazy friends who like smashing stuff up.

The Deadly 7 is a monster adventure by successful director Garth Jennings and is packed full of hilariously appealing illustrations.

Garth Jennings has directed many music videos and commercials as one third of the production company Hammer & Tongs. His work includes videos for Blur, Radiohead, Beck, Fatboy Slim and Vampire Weekend. He is the director of two feature films ¿ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Son of Rambow, for which he also wrote the screenplay and the Golden Globe nominated Sing, a feature-length animated film with an all-star cast, from the studio that created Despicable Me. He has also written The Deadly 7 and The Wildest Cowboy for Macmillan Children's Books.