The Broken Empire

They call it the Broken Empire: a hundred fractured kingdoms clawing at each other across a poisoned continent, where every child recites the catechism of the Builders without ever learning that the Builders were us. This is Mark Lawrence's dark fantasy of a far-future Earth remade by the Day of a Thousand Suns, a world where the dead do not always stay buried and a hard enough will can bend the broken laws of reality like light through cracked glass. What looks like sword-and-castle medievalism is the ash of our own age, and the magic is only physics that learned to listen. It runs as two braided trilogies. The Broken Empire proper follows Jorg Ancrath through Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, and Emperor of Thorns: a prince turned road-brigand at ten and something colder by fifteen, hacking toward a throne he was promised he could never hold. The Red Queen's War sets the very same years spinning around Prince Jalan Kendeth, a gifted coward, and Snorri, a Norseman with the Dead King's shadow at his heel, across Prince of Fools, The Liar's Key, and The Wheel of Osheim. The two roads cross; shorter tales stitch the gaps. What marks it out is the voice: first-person, unrepentant, funny the way a knife is funny, and quietly furious about the price of becoming the sort of man who wins. Begin at the beginning, with Prince of Thorns, and ride with Jorg; then let Prince of Fools show you the same wreckage through a coward's kinder eyes.