When you read a book about a boy who is probably going to die painfully, with plenty of bodily suffering along the way, and you still wish that you were him, you've found a winner. Mostly I regret that I lacked the specific peer group for regular twelve-hour Dungeons and Dragons sessions when I was the main character's age. I love Nick's interactions with his friends, especially Simon. The muted heartache he lives with, and his social outsider status, are things that, when portrayed authentically like they are here, are things that have resonated with me ever since my teen reading years. I think this series will stick with me the same way.

I don't know why I am often surprised when I come across something poetic in a Mark Lawrence novel, because it has happened it every series of his that I have read so far. Perhaps it's simply that this is not what draws me to fantasy and sci-fi in the first place, so to discover it is a pleasant bonus. Here, this passage struck me with its unadorned beauty and truth:

Simon came out to watch me unchain my bike. Shadows filled the street; the summer sun lingered only on the rooftops. I had one of those moments when you become suddenly hyper-aware of your surroundings. A car went past and birdsong filled the space it left behind, a sharp complexity of tweets and trills, pretty little threats levelled against all the world. The wind in the leaves, ten thousand almost separate sounds. All of it underwritten by the ever-present rumble of distant traffic. I stood with the chain in my hand, noting every gleam and glint from the cars lining the street, seeing the green flutter of the stunted cherry trees planted at twenty-yard intervals, and the houses themselves, bland 1940s terraced homes slowly succumbing to double glazing and central heating.

I rarely want a book to be longer, but here there were parts in the second half that I would love to spent more pages with, in particular Nick's allies' off-screen interactions.