The Stone Arrow (The Pagans Book 1)

Southern England, 3000 BC. Incomers, bringing agriculture from mainland Europe, are wrecking the virgin forests with slash-and-burn. The ancient territories and way of life of the native, nomadic hunter-gatherers, unchanged for millennia, are under threat.

Political rivalry inside the village of Burh, and the farmers’ superstitions, result in an attack on a nomad tribe in its nearby summer camp.

Tagart, the heir to the chief and at the very peak of his powers, is the only survivor.

The farmers thought they had killed everybody. They could not have made a worse mistake.

“This is a gripping thriller set convincingly in neolithic Sussex. Richard Herley’s first novel is crammed with archaeological detail, but all of it is subordinate to the fast-moving story of Tagart. His wife, child and tribe have been wiped out by a farming village, and we follow his dogged attempts to wreak revenge single-handedly with mixed horror and admiration. In the Stone Age, tribal loyalty is the only morality, and as Herley resurrects this time with such panache, the gruesome bits of Tagart’s vendetta seem justified.”

— Sunday Times

“The natural Darwinian world of which he writes with a blood-soaked passion left me gulping for air. Horridly imaginative, powerful in its refusal to avert its eyes from the results of violence, the book appeals to the blood lust in us all.”

— Glasgow Herald

“It is in every way a remarkable achievement.”

— Anthony Burgess

Tagart’s first objective for his single-handed work of retribution is the fortified village of Burh (in what is now known as the Cuckmere Valley), and the means he uses are more subtle and deadly than any traditional form of attack. This story of his revenge, his subsequent savage enslavement by the new lords of the land and his escape with Segle, the beautiful sister of another captive, introduces a new author of considerable significance. Richard Herley writes with acute sense of place, of wind and weather, of wild life and of the background of Stone Age England when the countryside is in its last virgin state before civilization begins.

Extent: 71,400 words (about 238 conventional pages)