Why You'll Love This
Jorg is eighteen, already a king, and still the most dangerous thing in the room — Lawrence dares you to keep rooting for him.
- Great if you want: a morally compromised antihero in a ruthlessly dark world
- The experience: dense and disorienting in the best way — dual timelines reward patience
- The writing: Lawrence fractures the narrative with memory and myth, never explaining too much
- Skip if: unredeemable protagonists genuinely spoil the reading experience for you
About This Book
Jorg Ancrath is eighteen years old, newly crowned, and already drowning in enemies. In King of Thorns, the second novel in Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire trilogy, Jorg holds a kingdom he clawed out through ruthlessness and blood—and now someone wants it back, badly enough to march an army to his gates. Lawrence doesn't let Jorg off the hook for who he is or what he's done. This is a story about a young man who has everything he fought for and still can't outrun himself, told with a tension that makes the political and the personal feel equally dangerous.
What distinguishes this book is its architecture. Lawrence splits the narrative across two timelines, weaving them together with careful, controlled precision so that both strands build pressure on each other. The prose is lean and sharp with an almost poetic edge—spare enough to move fast, dense enough to reward attention. Jorg's voice is the real engine here: furious, intelligent, and self-aware in ways that unsettle rather than comfort. Lawrence refuses easy moral footing, and that refusal is exactly what makes the pages hard to put down.
