Before the thorns taught me their sharp lessons and bled weakness from me I had but one brother, and I loved him well. But those days are gone and what is left of them lies in my mother’s tomb. Now I have many brothers, quick with knife and sword, and as evil as you please. We ride this broken empire and loot its corpse. They say these are violent times, the end of days when the dead roam and monsters haunt the night. All that’s true enough, but there’s something worse out there, in the dark. Much worse.
From being a privileged royal child, raised by a loving mother, Jorg Ancrath has become the Prince of Thorns, a charming, immoral boy leading a grim band of outlaws in a series of raids and atrocities. The world is in chaos: violence is rife, nightmares everywhere. Jorg has the ability to master the living and the dead, but there is still one thing that puts a chill in him. Returning to his father’s castle Jorg must confront horrors from his childhood and carve himself a future with all hands turned against him.
This is the book that made grimdark fans argue. The narrator is funny, clever and appalling, and Lawrence says Burgess's A Clockwork Orange was the spark. The voice is the whole trick. Jorg is about fourteen, though Lawrence says the age is there to blur guilt and evoke a damaged half-child, so don't treat the number as exact.
It's short and fast for epic fantasy, with punchy sentences and very little worldbuilding. The fight is over whether an unrepentant teenage narrator is an honest study of trauma or a book that never condemns him, and whether the few, mostly victimized women are a narrow viewpoint or a flaw. Both camps have a case. Make up your mind in the opening chapters, because they don't soften.
The reviews split along the book's fault line: Publishers Weekly found it morbidly gripping, while Reactor admired the prose but rejected its moral stance and treatment of women. Fantasy-Faction saw a boundary-pushing debut that became 2011's great reader argument. It was a Goodreads Choice nominee for Best Fantasy.
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The Broken Empire
