Hello! I'm Joe Abercrombie and these are my lovely new shelves which thanks to our
excellent joiner, Colin, have enabled me to get all of my books out of the boxes in
which they've been languishing for years and also to achieve a boyhood dream by
having a slidey library ladder like Belle in Beauty and the Beast. Over here on the
right we have what is probably the world's foremost collection of Joe
Abercrombie books. In fact I think I'd be a little bit scared if anyone had a
bigger one than this. The newest arrival is my forthcoming book, A Little Hatred,
which is the first in a new trilogy called The Age of Madness. It takes place
in the same world as my First Law trilogy. I was always a little bit
frustrated by the fantasy I read as a kid which seemed to take place in these
kind of medieval sandboxes where the world never progressed. And so in this
book the world is moving into a kind of industrial phase and a new style of
people, investors, inventors, engineers are becoming more and more powerful and
there's a social and industrial revolution on the way. It's similar to my
other books in the sense that it's an epic sweep of love and war with some
vivid characters involved in crunching action and moving romance and
Machiavellian scheming. But this time against a backdrop of social and
industrial revolution. One of my all-time favourites from within the fantasy genre
is George R. R. Martin's little-known Game of Thrones. And I have, as it happens,
several copies of this book. Probably the most elaborate book I have in my
possession is this Folio Society limited edition in two volumes including
illustrations on the inside of the slipcase, if you can believe that. Not to
mention a separate hardcover fold-out map for those of us who
enjoy that sort of thing. In a way, closer to my heart is this horribly faded and
rather cheesy old paperback of Game of Thrones which is the one that I first
read when it came out back in the 90s. This is a really important book for me
because I think before this I'd always thought of fantasy as kind of shiny and
heroic and perhaps in the end a little predictable. And Game of Thrones really
changed my idea about what fantasy could be. It was dark and gritty and shocking
and was really focused on the characters in a way that I hadn't seen before.
Fantasy had imitated Lord of the Rings a lot in having this sort of
dispassionate quite formal style of narration and in Game of Thrones we find
ourselves really pressed up very close to this set of very vivid and
strange and morally ambiguous characters. And that kind of visceral involvement
with the people was something I really wanted to aim for myself when I started
writing. It's not very far, at least alphabetically, from Martin to McMurtry.
Although I write fantasy I don't actually read a huge amount of it these
days. I read a lot of nonfiction and fiction in other genres and I've always
been a big fan of the Western. Maybe it's the tough men against the tough country.
Lonesome Dove is maybe the classic revisionist Western. It's about a pair of
grizzled, old Texas Rangers, legendary fighters really, who have retired and
they decide to be the first men to drive cattle from Texas across the full
length of the U.S. to Montana. And this is the story of the strange people ,the
deep relationships and the weird misadventures they have along the way.
It starts almost as a comedy and ends up as a really moving and effecting tragedy.
And it has some fantastic action sequences, some really impressive revision of
the past, a lot of things to say about the change of the West. And above all
just some brilliant, really beautifully drawn characters that stick with you
long after the last page. And then finally I said that I read a lot of
nonfiction and one of my absolute favourites which I'm not going to risk my
life by actually removing from the shelf is Shelby Foote's monumental narrative
history of the American Civil War. The first time I read this book I borrowed
it from a bibliophile friend of mine. He's very particular about the way his
books are treated and so I ended up reading these massive paperbacks on the
tube barely open, peering in, for fear of damaging the spine. And later got my own
edition. Shelby Foote was a novelist and he really comes to his material with a
novelist's eye. It's a really huge and wide-ranging account of the American
Civil War that focuses on the military aspects, on the battles, the generals, the
soldiers from both sides. But also dips widely into the wider society, the
diplomatic, political, the economics. And it's a fascinating, huge tapestry that he
weaves, full of fascinating characters, amazing anecdotes, details and events
that really have to be read to be believed.
Clearly it's a monumental task even reading it. He spent 25 years I think
writing it. So not to be taken on lightly but well worth the effort I think.