Sorrow’s Knot

Published: October 29, 2013

ISBN: 978-0545166669

Please consider supporting your local independent bookstore or library. My local indie, Words Worth Books, can hook you up with signed copies. Ask them!

The girl who remade the world was born in winter...  

At the very edge of the world live the Shadowed People. And with them live the dead.

There, in the village of Westmost, Otter is born to power. She is the proud daughter of Willow, the greatest binder of the dead in generations. It will be Otter’s job someday to tie the knots of the ward, the only thing that keeps the living safe.

Kestrel is training to be a ranger, one of the brave women who venture into the forest to gather whatever the Shadowed People can’t live without and to fight off whatever dark threat might slip through the ward’s defenses.

And Cricket wants to be a storyteller -- already he shows the knack, the ear -- and already he knows dangerous secrets.


But something is very wrong at the edge of the world. Willow’s power seems to be turning inside out. The ward is in danger of falling. And lurking in the shadows, hungry, is a White Hand, the most dangerous of the dead, whose very touch means madness, and worse.

Suspenseful, eerie, and beautifully imagined.

Awards 

  • Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy

  • Kirkus Best Books of 2013

  • Quill & Quire Best Book of 2013

  • Shortlisted for a  CBC Reader's Choice Award, a Sunburst Award, and several more.

Reviewers say: 

For the free women of the forest, death is a complex, dangerous thing: The dead are bound, and some rise again as White Hands, whose touch brings madness and transformation. Bow’s lyrical writing, which beats like a storyteller’s drum, tells a story both specific and timeless. ...A lovely gem, dark and quiet as the dead but glimmering with life as well. Not to be missed.

-Kirkus (starred review)

 

Like the cords that Otter must master to fend off the dead, Bow’s prose is powerful, insidious, and heart- squeezing. This book is brutal, beautiful, and not to be missed.

-Quill & Quire (starred review)

Authors say:  

This is a gut-wrenching, beautiful, scary tale of three friends, a Storyteller, a Hunter, and a Binder (she ties knots that tie things together, and sometimes release them), whose village is surrounded by the ghosts of the dead. Most of them can be dealt with, but the horrifying White Hands will devour the spirits of the living, and return to trap others. Only a Binder can bind the newly dead so they won't return as White Hands. And the most terrifying White Hand of all is one who was once a Binder.

This is, quite literally, a book that will haunt you.

-- Tamora Pierce