Ransom Riggs starts his second Peculiar Children novel in mid-stride, with the island already behind Jacob and his friends and open water in front of them.

Hollow City picks up directly from Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and runs as book two of the series, published by Quirk Books in January 2014. The children need help that only their own kind can provide, so they set a course for London, the peculiar capital of the world, and arrive in a city already being taken apart by the Blitz. The wights are still behind them. Every loop they step into keeps its own hour, its own rules and its own residents, including a menagerie of peculiar animals.

The found photographs remain the engine of the thing. Riggs writes toward real vintage images, cracked, posed, often strange, so the book reads as novel and album at once, and the pictures arrive as evidence rather than decoration.

The shift from the first book is structural. Jacob, Emma Bloom and the rest spend this one in transit instead of sheltering in a house, which turns a haunted-home story into a road story under bombardment, with rationing, blackouts and soldiers between them and anywhere safe.

Read the first book first. Cassandra Jean's 2016 graphic-novel adaptation offers a second way in for readers who want the images doing more of the work.