Echo Island · Book One
The Clan Games
Out nowKindle · Paperback · Audible
A masked thief hands fifteen-year-old Calum O’Brian a wooden box and tells him not to open it. Behind the Great Wall the Ten Clans have spent three hundred years deliberately holding their own progress back — and the box turns out to be an invitation from a people who are not human.
Free to read on Kindle Unlimited · 78,000 words · 20 chapters
What is in this book
Plant technology, not magic.
Echo Island runs on botany. Bark that responds to belief, nuts that drop you into a memory trance, spheres that wipe the last ten minutes out of your head. Everything strange in these books grows.
Three hundred years ago the founders of the Ten Clans decided to stop advancing on purpose. Ten clans, behind one wall, each holding a single trade — building, mining, the ocean, the military — and nobody crosses into the Burly Wood. It has worked for three centuries. It is about to stop working.
Calum O’Brian is fifteen, from the Eighth Clan, and has been compulsively writing things down since he was eleven. The journal is the reason he survives the year. A thief puts a flower box in his hands, the box shocks him and shows him things that are not his to remember, and by the end of it he has been recruited, betrayed, blown up, and handed a route out of the only country he has ever known.
The Games
Five events, one for each legendary animal — mammoth bear, spear cat, gullen bird, white brocket, great owl. Strength, reflex, speed, observation, patience. Almost anything is legal, and the clans have had a hundred and twenty-two years to get creative about that.
The Hero
A rebel in a mask who wants the clans to stop cowering from the truth. He is not obviously wrong, which is the problem. He also gets people killed.
The Fox Clan
Forty-two people, secret, founded alongside the Ten Clans to hold them together if the whole arrangement ever collapsed. Their book is findable, but only by the intensely curious.
Safe to hand to a thirteen-year-old
No profanity and nothing graphic on the page. I teach seventh and eighth grade English, so this one gets read aloud to actual thirteen-year-olds before it gets published.
- Mammoth BearStrength & resolve
- Spear CatAgility & reflex
- Gullen BirdSpeed & endurance
- White BrocketObservation
- Great OwlPatience & wisdom
Reader reviews · Amazon
Not my words.
Quoted from Amazon, trimmed for length and otherwise unedited.
★★★★★
“Super exciting, twisty, unique story, very well written, targeted for young adults but I enjoyed it (even as a not-so-young adult)… I will seek out other works by this author.”
★★★★★
“I’m always on the lookout for a good fantasy book and I love this. I’m really excited for book 2! If you’re reading this, take this as your sign to get this book!!”
★★★★★
“A wonderfully written book that keeps you entertained and engaged.”
Free prequel · not sold anywhere
The Belrose Journals
Henry Belrose keeps a field journal in Amazonas in the summer of 1924. Eight dated entries, three illustrated plates, and a steady scientific hand right up until the world stops being the one he left.
Read it after book one and before book two. Henry is a main character in Fall of the Ten Clans, and the journal stops exactly where that novel starts.
Eight entries. Three plates. Yours free.
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Then read · book two
The Eighth Clan falls on the last page of this one.
Book Two · October 6, 2026
Fall of the Ten Clans
Four clans have fallen in four daring moves and declared themselves a new nation. Calum’s father is dead, the flower box is destroyed, and the only route to the Tuatha is a page of notes in his own handwriting. Book two takes him over the Great Wall.