Published March 26, 2012 by Gollancz.

ISBN:
978-0-575-09582-3
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5 stars (1 review)

They burned her home. They stole her brother and sister. But vengeance is following.

Shy South hoped to bury her bloody past and ride away smiling, but she'll have to sharpen up some bad old ways to get her family back, and she's not a woman to flinch from what needs doing. She sets off in pursuit with only a pair of oxen and her cowardly old step father Lamb for company. But it turns out Lamb's buried a bloody past of his own. And out in the lawless Far Country the past never stays buried.

Their journey will take them across the barren plains to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feud, duel and massacre, high into the unmapped mountains to a reckoning with the Ghosts. Even worse, it will force them into an alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, and his feckless lawyer Temple, …

3 editions

The first Western I ever loved

5 stars

I am an Abercrombie fangirl, really, I am. Once again, we return to this gritty, grimy brutal world, full of terrible people. It's really not a fantasy novel at all this time, it's 100% western, which is really not my style, but it was excellent.

Our main protagonist is Shy South, a farmer in the Near Country, a frontier region west of the Union. She lives on a farm with her two younger siblings and an old guy from the North called Lamb who is a father figure to her. One day the two of them come home from trading in town to find their farm has been burned down, and the children have been kidnapped. This begins a long ordeal of the two of them chasing the bandits who are stealing children, taking them ever more west to the Far Country, the gold rush frontier.

Anyone who has read …