Fault Lines

In 1991, hikers discovered a frozen body in the Alps-a man dead for over 5,000 years, an arrow buried in his back.

Scientists called him Ötzi. They catalogued his copper axe, his unfinished bow, the contents of his stomach. They built theories about robbery, ritual sacrifice, tribal warfare.

They were all wrong.

Fault Lines imagines the truth.

A village. A famine. A theft that shatters everything.

Kel is a goatherd with a wife who starves herself to feed their son. Luka is his oldest friend, desperate enough to steal copper from the chief's stores. When Kel tries to stop an execution, his arrow flies wide-and the chief falls dead.

Now Kel and Luka are running. Behind them, the chief's daughter Aila leads the hunt, torn between duty and the mercy her father never showed. Ahead lies only the frozen peaks, the circling wolves, and a reckoning none of them will survive unchanged.

Four men will die on this mountain. Only the ice will remember.

A gripping tale of hunger, justice, and impossible choices at the dawn of civilization.

Fault Lines is literary prehistoric fiction that brings the Copper Age to vivid life-the smoke-filled dwellings, the desperate winters, the bonds of kinship strained to breaking. It asks the questions that haunt every community under pressure: When resources run out, who decides who eats? When the law fails, what replaces it? And what do we owe each other when survival itself is at stake?

Perfect for readers who loved:
• The Gathering Night by Margaret Elphinstone
• The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace
• Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

What readers are saying:

"Atmospheric, morally complex, and deeply researched. The final chapter-connecting the fiction to the real discovery-left me devastated in the best way."

"I couldn't stop thinking about these characters. Aila's choice at the end will stay with me for a long time."

"Finally-a prehistoric novel that treats its characters as fully human, not just historical curiosities. This is what the genre can be."

"I never cry, and this story had ne sobbing throughout"

The mountain keeps what we leave behind.
It does not keep our reasons.

Discover the story the ice couldn't tell.

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