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The Oathbreaker's Shadow
The Oathbreaker's Shadow
Dec 4, 2025 10:16 PM

Author:Amy McCulloch

The Oathbreaker's Shadow

Fifteen-year-old Raim lives in a world where you tie a knot for every promise that you make. Break that promise and you are scarred for life, and cast out into the desert.

Raim has worn a simple knot around his wrist for as long as he can remember. No one knows where it came from, and which promise of his it symbolises, but he barely thinks about it at all - not since becoming the most promising young fighter ever to train for the elite Yun guard. But on the most important day of his life, when he binds his life to his best friend (and future king) Khareh, the string bursts into flames and sears a dark mark into his skin.

Scarred now as an oath-breaker, Raim has two options: run, or be killed.

Reviews

The Oathbreaker’s Shadow is a very promising debut in what bodes to be an electrifying duology.

—— Robin Hobb

Absolutely gripping

—— Conn Iggulden

The Oathbreaker's Shadow is a rare, rare thing; something new in fantasy. At last we've got a story without all the tropes of elves, ogres and knights but a high adventure inspired by Mongolia.
McCulloch's story is rich with life, real, vivid and utterly compelling.

—— Sarwat Chadda

Exotic lands, cool magic and high adventure - The Oathbreaker's Shadow has it all . . . the most compelling fantasy I've read in years

—— Jonathan Stroud

Precise, compressed, intimately rhythmic, mesmerizingly smart

—— Globe and Mail

[Moore’s] pedigree is apparent on every page

—— Barry Didcock , Herald

Caught is an elaborate cat and mouse chase, written with a haughty bite. With ever growing command and intensity, Moore’s omniscient prose slowly reveals an intricate trap which surrounds her protagonist. Her investment in characters’ verisimilitude makes it hard not to root for the bad guy... Moore’s narrative landscape is rich in imagery and personality, contributing to the lasting impression of her latest novel.

—— Maria Whelan , The Skinny

Caught is a literary adventure story, which is to say it is both action-packed while being an investigation into character and motive. An outstanding novel, combining the complexity of the best literary fiction with the page-turning compulsive readability of a thriller.

—— National Post

As trippy, mellow, and revelatory as Hearn’s weed, Caught takes pleasure from rewriting crime formulas and gives pleasure in doing so.

—— The Vancouver Sun

This is an author who grips you with her impeccable use of language. The novel walks a great line between paperback levity and psychological intelligence.

—— Macleans

It is a page-turner that also displays great psychological insight

—— Good Book Guide

Caught is not just a good old-fashioned adventure story, but also has the epic, tragic weight of Homer’s Odyssey

—— Rebecca Foster , Nudge

Funny and surprisingly moving

—— Glamour

It is completely wonderful . . . Good god he is talented

—— Sarah Jessica Parker

Enormously impressive: profoundly and humanely engaged with the mysteries of belief and disbelief . . . dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be

—— Guardian

Brilliant . . . witty . . . passages of flashing comedy that sound like a stand-up theologian suffering a nervous breakdown

—— Washington Post

Joshua Ferris excels at mordantly comic novels about ordinary people in crisis . . . he writes with brio about the modern condition

—— Metro

Compelling but never cheap, inventive but never obscure . . . Ferris has secured his status as exactly the sort of mainstream literary novelist American fiction needs

—— Independent on Sunday

A hoot . . . There's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a dash, too, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to US literary fiction

—— FT

Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel. If misanthropy's going to come from anywhere it's from a lifetime's confrontation with halitosis

—— BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review

This is fierce, pithy, unforgiving satire, taking a sledgehammer to all-American cracker-barrel homeliness. Its comic energy is fuelled by disgust and exasperation, in the tradition of Roth and Heller and John Kennedy O'Toole. But Ferris is also a dab hand at more delicate humour, every bit as contemporary . . . Ferris is very funny . . . His voice is unique

—— Craig Brown , Mail on Sunday

Joshua Ferris has been heralded as one of America's sharpest observers of 21st-century life and, reading his third novel, it's easy to see why. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has the immediacy and the trenchant satire of a brilliant stand-up routine as well as the big ideas and the in-depth research of a brilliant academic paper

—— Express

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a funny novel, by turns ha-ha, peculiar and, like O'Rourke himself, suspended between heaven and earth

—— Independent

A virtuoso piece of entertainment which hurtles satisfyingly towards its conclusion after delivering a startling, didn’t-see-that-coming sucker-punch of a twist.

—— A Life in Books

Funny, moving and thought-provoking

—— Big Issue in the North

The key to Harkaway’s writing is the incredibly textured depth and imaginative characterisation. It is one of those books whose character are so rich that by the climax, you feel like they’ve penetrated your reality and you want to keep them close, even after the book is over.

—— Nudge

Original and exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work

—— Morning Star

Original, exciting, full of humanity and comedy, Tigerman by Nick Harkaway is a beautiful piece of work.

—— Morning Star
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