The City of Ember

The City of Ember, subtitled The First Book of Ember, is a 2003 novel by Jeanne DuPrau published by Random House. It is the first book of the Ember sequence, and the two hundred years between the city's founding and the story's present are the reason its machinery is failing without anyone left who can repair it.

The premise is a sealed city. Ember was constructed as a refuge for humanity, and its inhabitants have lived under artificial light for two hundred years without an external source of power that anyone now understands. The novel opens at the point where the lamps begin to fail, so the city's technological history becomes an immediate problem rather than background.

The plot is a search for a message. Lina discovers part of an ancient communication and treats it as the way out, and she and her friend Doon have a fixed amount of time to interpret it. Because the two of them are children who have just been assigned their adult occupations, their access to the city's records and machinery comes through work rather than through authority, which is what the messengers and city-planning subjects describe.