Broken Empire Books in Order

The Broken Empire trilogy is where Mark Lawrence’s career as a novelist began, and it remains one of his most talked about works. Told in the first person by Jorg Ancrath, it follows a boy prince who responds to trauma with ruthlessness and charisma instead of retreat.

The world looks medieval on the surface, all castles, kingdoms and mud. Underneath, though, it is a far future landscape layered over the ruins of our own civilisation. Relics of lost “Builder” technology sit alongside necromancers, ghosts and saints, and belief has enough weight that ideas can warp reality.

In Prince of Thorns, Jorg is a teenager leading a band of outlaws after witnessing the murder of his mother and younger brother. He rides back to the castle he fled as a child, determined to confront the father who failed him and to seize whatever power he can along the way. The book does not flinch from his violence, but it also lets readers see the boy still buried somewhere inside the monster he is trying to become.

King of Thorns jumps forward to find Jorg as a young king defending a hard won throne against a much stronger rival. The story moves between the siege itself and earlier events, slowly revealing how he manoeuvred different factions and unearthed dangerous artefacts to give himself a chance. Along the way it deepens the sense that Jorg’s choices, good and bad, are part of something larger than one man’s revenge.

In Emperor of Thorns, the Broken Empire’s scattered rulers converge on Vyene to elect an emperor for the first time in generations. Jorg intends to win that vote by any means necessary, but he is also up against the Dead King, a being who commands the undead and wants to end the world in order to remake it. The finale pushes Jorg to face both his past and the consequences of the power he has taken.

Short fiction collected in Road Brothers and other pieces set around the trilogy expand on the “brothers” in Jorg’s band and on side characters who only briefly cross his path in the main books. Together, they round out a setting where loyalty, vengeance and love sit side by side with cruelty, and where the path to the throne is literally broken.