A Land Fit For Heroes Books in Order

A Land Fit For Heroes is Richard K Morgan’s foray into dark, grown up fantasy. The trilogy takes place in the uneasy peace after a brutal war in which humans and their Kiriath allies drove back the lizard like Scaled Folk. Empires won, but the victory left veterans damaged, the old magic restless and a lot of people wondering what the war was really for.

At the centre of it all is Ringil Eskiath, a cynical, middle aged swordsman who became a war hero almost by accident and was then cast out by his aristocratic family because he is gay and inconvenient. His closest allies are Archeth, a half Kiriath advisor to an aging emperor who is slowly dismantling her people’s abandoned technology, and Egar Dragonbane, a Majak steppe warrior who cannot quite fit back into clan life.

In The Steel Remains Ringil is dragged back from exile when his mother begs him to find a cousin sold into legal slavery. The search leads him into the orbit of the Dwenda, eerie, near immortal beings tied to the vanished Aldrain, and into the grey borderlands between worlds. As his friends follow their own trails, the three storylines knot together around a rising threat that most of the human elite prefer to ignore.

The Cold Commands broadens the scope. A crashed Kiriath construct warns that the Ilwrack Changeling, a human child raised among the Aldrain, is about to wake and bring their whole cruel race back with him. Ringil, Archeth and Egar join an expedition to find the drifting island where he sleeps, while political and religious forces in the empire sharpen their knives behind them.

The final book, The Dark Defiles, follows the fallout of that expedition as Ringil risks everything to master a dangerous form of magic and confront the Changeling directly. Separated from his companions and pushed into the bleak Grey Places, he has to decide how much of himself he is willing to lose in order to change a world that may not want saving. Archeth and Egar, meanwhile, uncover long buried secrets about the Kiriath, the Aldrain and the fragile human empires caught between them.

The trilogy is full of ugly battles, black humour, messy sex and characters who are painfully aware of their own compromises.

If you are looking for fantasy where prophecies hurt real people, where gods and demons feel more like dangerous powers than distant myths, and where a queer, damaged swordsman gets to stand at the centre of the story, this series is worth the time.