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Let me be direct with you: the first chapter of Prince of Thorns depicts something awful. I’m not going to describe it, but you’ll know it when you encounter it, and it’s the reason a meaningful number of readers put the book down and never return.
That’s their prerogative. It would be dishonest to write a review of this book without mentioning it up front.
For the readers who continue past that opening, Prince of Thorns is one of the most electrifying anti-hero stories in modern fantasy.
What’s It About?
Jorg Ancrath is thirteen years old. He leads a band of road brothers — soldiers, killers, bandits — and is conducting a systematic campaign of violence against the people who wronged his family. He’s brilliant, pitiless, intermittently funny in a way that makes you deeply uncomfortable, and narrating everything in a voice of such controlled, sardonic intelligence that you can’t look away.
The world he operates in reveals itself slowly. It looks medieval European at first. It isn’t, quite — the clues are scattered through the text, and the full picture becomes clear over the trilogy.
The Prose
This is the central thing. Mark Lawrence writes beautifully. Not in the warm, lyrical way of Rothfuss — in a colder, more precise way. Jorg’s voice is unlike any other narrator in fantasy fiction. He’s fourteen going on ancient, capable of sudden moments of unexpected depth between passages of calculated brutality, and Lawrence sustains the voice across three books without it becoming monotonous.
It’s the prose that keeps readers reading despite the character. You want to know what he’ll say next even when you’re appalled by what he’s done.
The World
The fantasy-post-apocalypse world of the Broken Empire is one of the genre’s most interesting settings. Lawrence has built a place that initially reads as generic medieval fantasy and gradually reveals itself to be something else entirely — the kind of worldbuilding that rewards rereading for the clues hiding in plain sight.
The mystery of the world’s real nature is one of the pleasures of the trilogy, and it’s answered satisfyingly by the end.
The Anti-Hero Question
Is Jorg redeemable? Should we want him to be? Lawrence doesn’t make this easy, and the trilogy doesn’t offer a simple answer. By book three, Emperor of Thorns, you’ll have a more complicated feeling about Jorg than almost any other protagonist in fantasy — and that’s exactly the point.
Readers who loved The Blade Itself for Glokta’s moral complexity will find something similar here, in a more extreme register. Abercrombie is darker than Tolkien. Lawrence is darker than Abercrombie.
Should You Read It?
If you’re comfortable with the content warning at the top of this review and want to read something genuinely unlike most epic fantasy — yes. If you prefer your protagonists to have some recognisable moral foundation — skip it, and try The Blade Itself instead, which handles moral complexity with more handholds for the reader.
For readers who love it, Prince of Thorns is the beginning of one of the genre’s great trilogies. See the Mark Lawrence reading guide for where to go next.
Rating: 4/5
Rated 4.3 Stars on Amazon. Buy Prince of Thorns here.
You Might Also Like
- Mark Lawrence Books in Order
- The Blade Itself Review
- The Edge of Darkness: 9 Grimdark Fantasy Books
- The Best Fantasy Book Series of All Time
Check out Sunset In the East — a mind-bending short story collection from Ben Luxon.
