Jorg Ancrath is thirteen years old and already a monster. Once the pampered heir to the kingdom of Ancrath, he watched from the thorns that trapped him as assassins murdered his mother and young brother—an atrocity his father let stand. Four years later, Jorg leads a band of cutthroats and outlaws across a blighted, half-ruined land, taking what he wants by fire and blade and nursing plans of revenge that reach far higher than any road-gang chief should dare.
When Jorg returns at last to his father's castle, he walks into a court thick with poison, ambition, and a dark magic that has quietly been steering his life for years. To claim the throne he believes is his—and to break the enemies who broke him—he will have to outthink forces far older and stranger than the men who fear him.
The debut novel of Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire trilogy, Prince of Thorns is a landmark of grimdark fantasy: a bleak, propulsive, morally uncompromising story set in a ruined far future, narrated by one of the genre's most unsettling antiheroes.