Gregor the Overlander

Gregor the Overlander is a children's fantasy novel by the American writer Suzanne Collins, published in 2003 as the first book of The Underland Chronicles, a fantasy series that came before her later novels for older readers.

Gregor is eleven years old and looking after his two-year-old sister Boots one summer when the two of them fall through a grate in the laundry room of their building and land in a world beneath New York. The Underland is inhabited by people, oversized bats, rats, cockroaches and spiders, all of which have their own politics and grudges, and the arrival of two children from above is taken as the fulfilment of a prophecy. Gregor is not interested in being anyone's hero: his father disappeared two years earlier and he wants only to get his sister home, so he makes a bargain with the people who found him. Collins sets the quest against the boy's ordinary preoccupations, including his family's money troubles and his mother's rules.

Collins wrote the series for middle-grade readers and followed it with four further books, and this novel establishes the Underland, its rulers and the prophecy that the later books work out.