Tooth and Claw cover art

Tooth and Claw

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Tooth and Claw

By: Jo Walton
Narrated by: John Lee
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £13.99

Buy Now for £13.99

About this listen

A tale of contention over love and money - among dragons.

Jo Walton burst onto the fantasy scene with The King's Peace, acclaimed by writers as diverse as Poul Anderson, Robin Hobb, and Ken MacLeod. In 2002, she was voted the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Now Walton returns with a very different kind of fantasy story: the tale of a family dealing with the death of their father, of a son who goes to law for his inheritance, a son who agonizes over his father's deathbed confession, a daughter who falls in love, a daughter who becomes involved in the abolition movement, and a daughter sacrificing herself for her husband. Except that everyone in the story is a dragon, red in tooth and claw.

Here is a world of politics and train stations, of churchmen and family retainers, of courtship and country houses... in which, on the death of an elder, family members gather to eat the body of the deceased. In which society's high-and-mighty members avail themselves of the privilege of killing and eating the weaker children, which they do with ceremony and relish, growing stronger thereby. You have never read a novel like Tooth and Claw.

©2003 Jo Walton (P)2014 Audible Inc. Classics Fantasy Fiction Dragons
All stars
Most relevant
well ... it's a bit like reading a Jane Austen novel just that the characters are all dragons. I found it an enjoyable read (Sorry listening) but I wasn't blown away by it. In a way, the story was too predictable, having said that, I still enjoyed the ending. So for fans of Victorian romance novels it's definitively worth their while :-)

Victorian romance novel with a dragon twist

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
All characters are dragons in this intriguing novel, some of higher status and power, some of lower, some even serve of the rich and powerful. The story proceeds with a number of deaths, secret confessions and marriage proposals, as well as a crucial trial, and female dragons smartly make their own choices and enact decisive strategies as much as the more powerful males. Old customs are shown less and less appropriate for a civilised society while tolerance for all ideas seems to gain new relevance. By the end many dragons change their own status and fortune, and luckily all's well that ends well.

A noble society of Dragons

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I wonder how many people listening to Midnight Sun heard about the book Tooth and Claw and then purchased it. The recommendation by a fictional character was very welcome as this was a book I wouldn't have ever heard about. I really enjoyed it and living the lives of dragons alongside the heroes and heroines and their opponents was most enjoyable. I'm off to listen to another Jo Walton book.

An odd way to get a book recommendation.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.