
About the Author:īook Description Paperback. So I thought I'd write some.You like your fantasy with the edges left on? Try The First Law.

I want a fantasy that can shock and surprise, amuse and horrify, delight and excite me, all at once.I spent a long time looking, and I couldn't find a set of books quite like that. I want to read about characters as selfish, as flawed, as complicated, and as unpredictable as real people. I want blood, sweat, and tears, and plenty of them. I want magic and adventure, sure, but I want it to hurt. I want dialogue that actually sounds like people talking, and action that actually feels like people fighting. Where good and evil are a matter of where you stand, just like in the real world. There'll be battles, there'll be intrigue, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if a magic sword came up somewhere along the way.I don't need to read that again.I want to read a fantasy with all the grit, and cruelty, and humour of real life.

Probably there's a prophecy, and a farmboy with mysterious parentage, and if not a magic tower, then certainly a strange tall building of some kind. They fight like extras from a bad cop show. They talk like extras from a bad soap opera. Probably there's a dark lord of some kind involved. They're all engaged in a mysterious quest to bring that from there, and they're all made out of cardboard. It's all the same, no? There's a grumpy wizard, a deadly barbarian, a jumped-up nobleman and some feisty girl, more than likely. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Įpic fantasy. A bald old man with a terrible temper and a pathetic assistant, he could be the First of the Magi, he could be a spectacular fraud, but whatever he is, he's about to make the lives of Glotka, Jezal and Logen a whole lot more difficult.

But as he's discovering, old habits die really, really hard indeed. And Logen Ninefingers, an infamous warrior with a bloody past, is about to wake up in a hole in the snow with plans to settle a blood feud with Bethod, the new King of the Northmen, once and for all - ideally by running away from it. Vain, shallow, selfish and self-obsessed, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men. Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and increasingly bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer extraordinaire, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.
