Joe Abercrombie Books

Joe Abercrombie was born in Lancaster in 1974 and worked as a freelance film editor before turning to fiction, a former day job you can feel in every fight scene he has ever cut together on the page. The Blade Itself arrived in 2006 and opened The First Law trilogy, completed by Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. It took every beat of classic epic fantasy, the wise wizard, the noble quest, the barbarian hero, and rotted them all from the inside. Logen Ninefingers, the most feared killer in the North, just wants to stop being who he is and cannot. Glokta, a crippled torturer with the best internal monologue in the genre, investigates everyone including himself. And Bayaz, the Gandalf figure, gradually reveals himself to be the most dangerous man in the world. Readers crowned Abercrombie Lord Grimdark, and he took the title with visible delight.

He followed the trilogy with three standalones in the same world, each borrowing a different genre: Best Served Cold (2009), a revenge thriller starring the magnificent and terrible mercenary Monza Murcatto, The Heroes (2011), an entire novel about a single three-day battle, and Red Country (2012), a western with swords. After a detour into the leaner young adult Shattered Sea trilogy beginning with Half a King (2014), he returned for the Age of Madness trilogy, A Little Hatred (2019), The Trouble With Peace (2020), and The Wisdom of Crowds (2021), which brought an industrial revolution to his world and handed the story to the flawed children of the original cast. Burning mills, riots, and progress as its own kind of violence: nobody else in fantasy is writing political economy this entertainingly.

Then came The Devils in May 2025, his loosest, funniest book, and his most relevant to this shelf. A disgraced monk is assigned to the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, a church black-ops unit staffed entirely by monsters: a werewolf with no impulse control, an urbane elderly vampire, a necromancer with an ego problem, an elf, and worse, all escorting a streetwise thief who may be the lost heir to an empire across a hostile continent. It reads like a heist movie with fangs. A sequel, The Heretics, is due in May 2027 with the second draft already finished, and James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment picked up the film rights, which is not a sentence anyone had on their card in 2006.

What defines Abercrombie is voice. Every point-of-view character narrates like themselves, the gallows humour never stops, and his action sequences are edited, properly edited, with the rhythm of someone who spent years in a cutting room. His creed, delivered through Logen, is that you have to be realistic about these things. Honest criticism: the cynicism can wear thin across the Age of Madness books, and his endings prefer bitter irony to catharsis on principle, which is the point, but you will feel it in your chest anyway.

Romance and heat: a 1 to 2. Sex exists in his books, usually ill-advised, occasionally tender by accident, never the engine. But The Devils is genuinely romantasy-adjacent: monster found family, bickering that curdles into loyalty, and a werewolf woman with golden-retriever-who-bites energy who has already collected a fandom. If you came up through Fourth Wing and want to know what the dark end of the pool tastes like, he is the deep water.

Where to start: The Blade Itself for the classic route, trusting it through the slow first half, or The Devils if you want the fun one first, since it stands alone comfortably. Best Served Cold if you want revenge served by one of fantasy's great terrible women. The audiobooks, read by Steven Pacey, are widely considered some of the best ever recorded, and that is not hype.