Start with Prince of Thorns, with one large caveat: it opens with its fourteen-year-old narrator leading a band of raiders through an atrocity, and it does not apologise. Jorg Ancrath is a genuinely repellent character for the first stretch of the book, and a large number of readers put it down in chapter one. If you are one of them, the honest alternative entry to Mark Lawrence's world is Red Sister, which is set in the same broken world centuries later and requires no prior reading.
For everyone else, publication order is right, and the reason is structural: Prince of Thorns is written to make you complicit before it explains anything, and later books recontextualise Jorg substantially. Starting elsewhere and coming back removes the trick.
The four sequences
Lawrence's Broken Empire world runs across four connected trilogies. In publication order:
The Broken Empire — Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, Emperor of Thorns. Jorg's story, and the spine of everything.
The Red Queen's War — Prince of Fools, The Liar's Key, The Wheel of Osheim. Runs in parallel with the first trilogy, following a cowardly prince, Jalan Kendeth, and a Norse warrior. Much funnier and lighter in voice, and its ending intersects with Jorg's.
Book of the Ancestor — Red Sister, Grey Sister, Holy Sister. Set far later on a dying, ice-bound version of the same world. A convent that trains assassins. Widely considered his best writing, and the most self-contained.
Book of the Ice — The Girl and the Stars, Girl and the Mountain, and a third volume, The Girl and the Moon, which is not currently in our catalogue. Same era as Book of the Ancestor, told from the ice.
Should you interleave Red Queen's War with Broken Empire?
This is the one real order argument in the series. The two trilogies happen at the same time and touch at the end. Some readers advise alternating them — Prince of Thorns, Prince of Fools, King of Thorns, and so on — to preserve the chronology.
Do not. Read the Broken Empire trilogy complete, then Red Queen's War complete. The parallel structure works as recognition rather than as suspense, and Emperor of Thorns contains reveals that make the second trilogy far richer. Publication order is also the order Lawrence wrote them in for readers who had finished Jorg.
Honest warnings
The Broken Empire is grimdark of the harder kind. Rape, torture and child murder are present, mostly off-page but not always, and the narrator is a perpetrator rather than a witness. Lawrence is doing something specific with the unreliability of Jorg's voice, but if that is not a bargain you want, this is not a series to push through on principle.
King of Thorns uses a fragmented dual timeline with a memory-box device that many readers find confusing on a first pass. It settles.
The world is post-apocalyptic rather than medieval — the Builders were us, and the ruins are ours. This is revealed gradually and is easy to miss early.
Where to stop
After Emperor of Thorns is a complete story and a legitimate stopping point. If you want more but not more Jorg, skip Red Queen's War and go straight to Red Sister, which needs nothing before it. Book of the Ice is the most optional of the four.
More series reading orders are collected in Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: The Broken Empire Reading Order and Guide.
