Hearts of Oak
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3.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
"[Hearts of Oak packs in] the sort of profound and lacerating laughter that Robson's countrymen Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett perfected." –NPR
Hearts of Oak is a delightful science fiction adventure from Eddie Robson, the creator of the acclaimed Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully.
The buildings grow.
And the city expands.
And the people of the land are starting to behave abnormally.
Or perhaps they’ve always behaved that way, and it’s normality that’s at fault.
And the king of the land confers with his best friend, who happens to be his closest advisor, who also happens to be a talking cat. But that’s all perfectly natural and not at all weird.
Iona, close to retirement, finds that the world she has always known is nothing like she always believed it to be. There are dark forces . . . not dark. There are uncanny forces . . . no, not uncanny. There are forces, anyway, mostly slightly odd ones, and they appear to be acting in mysterious ways. It’s about town planning, it’s about cats and it’s about the nature of reality.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four people in an uncannily unchanging city come to question their reality in this piercing work. Iona, Steve, Saori, and Victor can't remember a time when they didn't live in the unnamed city or follow their daily routines. They go to work, go home, and repeat this cycle again the next day alongside their obedient, homogeneous fellow citizens. But the arrival of a stranger triggers repressed memories, sending all four hurtling into danger as they realize that the city is not a haven but a cage. Robson (Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully) is a master of the gradual release of information, ratcheting up the tension by degrees as both readers and characters learn the truth of his intricately constructed universe. The clipped, measured, and deceptively simple prose echoes the unnatural calm of the monotonous city and serves as a surprisingly effective vehicle as Powers raises questions about the nature of complacency and of humanity itself. Clever, emotional, and thematically rich, this is sure to please fans of classic science fiction.
