The Hammer - by K J Parker (Paperback)

About the Book

The met'Oc people are trying to maintain their noble lifestyle on an isolated plateau while coexisting uneasily with a group of colonists. Gignomai met'Oc, the youngest son, decides to repudiate his inheritance and escape to the wilderness to start a factory. In the process, he triggers a series of events that will lead to an accounting for his family's secret and independence for the colony.

Book Synopsis

A new stand-alone novel from the acclaimed author of The Company and The Folding Knife.

Gignomai is the youngest brother in the current generation of met'Oc, a once-noble family exiled on an island for their role in a vaguely remembered civil war.

On this island, a colony was founded seventy years ago. The plan was originally for the colonists to mine silver, but there turned out not to be any.

Now, an uneasy peace exists on the island, between the colonists and the met'Oc. The met'Oc are tolerated, in spite of occasional cattle stealing raids, since they alone possess the weapons considered necessary protection against the island's savages.

Gignomai is about to discover exactly what it is expected of him, and what it means to defy his family. He is the hammer who will provide the spark that will ignite a brutal and bloody war.

Review Quotes

"I have reviewed books before that I thought might someday be found to have achieved greatness.... But I am trying to be precise in my use of the word when I tell you that K.J. Parker is writing work after work that demands to be placed in that category. " --- Orson Scott Card on The Engineer trilogy

"It's a dark, bleak and fiercely intelligent portrait of the human condition..." --- SFX on The Company

"Imagine Lost meets The Italian Job...a masterfully planned and executed book, one that builds on ever-revealing characterization and back-story, leading slowly yet inexorably to its final conclusion." --- SFF World on The Company

About the Author

K.J. Parker is a pseudonym for Tom Holt. He was born in London in 1961. At Oxford he studied bar billiards, ancient Greek agriculture and the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines; interests which led him, perhaps inevitably, to qualify as a solicitor and emigrate to Somerset, where he specialized in death and taxes for seven years before going straight in 1995. He lives in Chard, Somerset, with his wife and daughter.