Act of Oblivion

Two regicides flee into the wilderness of seventeenth-century New England, carrying the weight of a king's blood and the knowledge that England's restored monarchy will never stop hunting them. Robert Harris takes a largely forgotten chapter of history — the years-long pursuit of the men who signed Charles I's death warrant — and transforms it into something visceral and urgent. At its heart, this is a novel about guilt, loyalty, and what it costs to hold a conviction when the world has turned against you. The tension between the hunters and the hunted is relentless, but Harris is equally interested in the moral landscape: what kind of men do this, and what do they become afterward?

Harris structures the novel as a dual-track chase, alternating between the fugitives' increasingly desperate existence in Puritan settlements and the obsessive pursuit of the agent sent to bring them back. The prose is clean and propulsive — Harris has always been a writer who trusts momentum — but here he also captures the strangeness of early colonial America with unusual texture. The period feels genuinely foreign rather than costumed. What distinguishes this from standard historical thriller territory is Harris's refusal to make the moral calculus easy: you understand everyone, and that understanding is its own kind of discomfort.