Blood Oath

by Chris Priestley

A Celtic tribe killed his father.
The Romans made him a soldier.
Now it's time for revenge.

129 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2011

About the author

His father was in the army and so he moved around a lot as a child and lived in Wales. He was an avid reader of American comics as a child, and when he was eight or nine, and living in Gibraltar, he won a prize in a newspaper story-writing competition. He decided then “that my ambition was to write and illustrate my own book”.
He spent his teens in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before moving to Manchester, London and then Norfolk. He now lives in Cambridge with his wife and son where he writes, draws, paints, dreams and doodles (not necessarily in that order). Chris worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for twenty years, working mainly for magazines & newspapers (these include The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal) before becoming a writer. He currently has a weekly strip cartoon called 'Payne's Grey' in the New Statesman.

Chris has been a published author since 2000. He has written several books for children & young-adults, both fiction and non-fiction, and
has been nominated for many awards including the Edgar Awards, the UKLA Children's Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. In recent years he has predominantly been writing horror.
Ever since he was a teenager Chris has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like 'Strange Tales' and 'House of Mystery', watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M R James ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury. He hopes Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror will haunt his readers in the way those writers have haunted him.

Reviews

[Matthew Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

After discovering the Heroes series based on an intriguing cover, I was excited to explore deeper to see if the rest of the series would pack as much of an entertaining punch and boy was I surprised! Chris Priestley is an author I have read before, and I was very pleased with his work, so when I saw he had a title in this series, I knew I was in for a treat. His incredibly inviting writing style is absolutely perfect for this type of book. While the plots are geared towards the young adult genre, I still found it to be an exciting and satisfying story. This is a wonderfully executed coming of age tale that is told in a way to keep the reader fully engaged and eager to turn the next page. I love how these books are tailor-made specifically to get younger readers excited about picking up a book! I'm definitely gonna have to finish off this series and bask in the emotional journey!