I originally purchased the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie(consisting of The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings) sometime around 2009. I’ve somehow went 15 years without reading them, so figured it was finally time to do so…
The books are mostly set in a country called the “Union”, and explore the inner politics of the nation, along with a series of conflicts with both the “North” (essentially a loosely organized collection of barbarians), and the “Gurkish” (an expansionist slave-owning empire in the South). The worldbuilding was somewhat confusing at first, but I slowly made more sense of it as the books continued.
There is an assortment of characters, including Sand dan Glotka (a former Union soldier previously captured and tortured prior to the start of the series, now a torturer himself), Logen Ninefingers and the Dogman (barbarians from the North), Ferro Maljinn (an escaped slave from the Gurkish), and Jezal dan Luthar and Collem West (both officers in the Union Army). There’s also an interesting collection of side characters (but not so many that I couldn’t remember who everyone was most of the time!).
The first book in the series, The Blade Itself, was definitely my least favorite of the three. It was by no means bad, it just took a little bit of time for the characters to really grab me, and plot-wise it very much felt like a prologue. Once some of the main characters finally meet each other, in the second book, and begin to interact more, is where it really started to click for me. The second and third books are some of my favourite books of those that I’ve read this year (and possibly this decade!).
The writing style really worked for me – I knew going in that the series was dark (and it is!), but I didn’t know just how funny it was. It’s black humor, for sure, but the writing had me laughing out loud on multiple occasions.
The character work was also a strong point. They’re all basically terrible people, but they’re so complex and well-written that I found myself liking them anyway. Glotka is a cynical sadistic torturer, but his inner monologue is hilarious. Logen can be a mindless killing machine, but he’s also genuinely nice, and has little nuggets of wisdom that he’s constantly sharing. Jezal is a lazy pathetic coward, but so much shit happens to him that I ended up feeling sorry for him.
There’s more books in the same world (as I understand, there’s a collection of “standalone” stories, as well as a second trilogy set a couple of decades after this one). Now that I’m invested in this world and it’s characters, it likely won’t take me another 15 years to complete the other books!