A Little Hatred — The Age of Madness, Book 1

A Little Hatred Review

Twenty-odd years after the events of the First Law trilogy, the Union is undergoing an industrial revolution, and Joe Abercrombie has found in that historical moment the perfect vehicle for his particular brand of political cynicism. A Little Hatred is his most ambitious book since The Heroes, a multi-POV ensemble novel that asks whether progress is possible in a world structurally designed to prevent it.

The novel follows six characters across the Union and the North. Leo dan Brock is a young lord-governor who wants to be a hero and has no idea what that actually costs. Savine dan Glokta — daughter of the original trilogy’s Supreme Inquisitor, now a ruthless venture capitalist — is making a fortune from the very industrial processes that are immiserating the workers in her mills. Rikke, daughter of the Dogman, is learning to use the Long Eye while her father’s power base crumbles. These are not their parents, but they carry family traits in ways that feel psychologically true rather than convenient.

The industrial setting is Abercrombie’s masterstroke. A fantasy world undergoing mechanisation allows him to dramatise class conflict, labour organising, and the violence of capital accumulation with historical remove but contemporary resonance. The Great Change — the workers’ uprising building through the novel — is neither romanticised nor dismissed. Abercrombie is too honest to make either the mill owners or the revolutionaries simply right.

What makes A Little Hatred work as a series opener is that it functions as a complete story while clearly establishing a larger arc. The ending is genuinely shocking in a way that retrospectively reframes several characters’ trajectories.

Reading Order

The First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings) should be read first. The standalone novels set in the world add context but are not required.

Reading Guides

• 15 Books Like Game of Thrones: Best Epic Fantasy for ASOIAF Fans (2026)
• Joe Abercrombie Books in Order: First Law and Complete Reading Guide (2026)

Industrial Revolution as Fantasy Setting: Why It Works

The choice to set the Age of Madness trilogy in a First Law world undergoing industrial revolution is Abercrombie’s most inspired structural decision since the three-day battle format of The Heroes. The industrial revolution as a historical event is the moment when capitalism’s logic became visible in its human consequences: machines replacing workers, previously agricultural populations urbanised by economic displacement, the emergence of class conflict as a systemic rather than individual phenomenon, and the violence — both spontaneous and organised — that accompanies these transformations.

Abercrombie does not use the setting to make simple historical analogies. He is not writing a parable about nineteenth-century Manchester. He is using the industrial revolution’s dynamics — the dispossession of artisan workers, the concentration of capital, the emergence of organised labour, the manipulation of popular anger by actors with their own agendas — to examine the First Law world’s political logic at a new stage of its development. The result feels contemporary not because it is allegorical but because the mechanisms it describes are still operational.

The Age of Madness Characters and the First Law Legacy

The intergenerational structure of the Age of Madness trilogy is one of its most psychologically rich features. Savine dan Glokta is not her father Sand dan Glokta — she has his intelligence and his ruthlessness but none of his tortured self-awareness, none of his cynicism about his own position. Leo dan Brock is not his father. Rikke is not her father the Dogman. But all of them carry family traits — specific forms of damage, specific blind spots, specific strengths — that make them legible as the children of people the reader already knows.

This is Abercrombie working at the level of multigenerational characterisation that a series gives him the room to attempt. The Age of Madness trilogy could not exist without the First Law trilogy behind it: not because it requires prior knowledge (it doesn’t, quite), but because the characters’ complexity is enriched beyond what a standalone could support by the knowledge of where they came from.

Savine dan Glokta: The Series’ Central Character

Savine is the most fully realised character Abercrombie has created since Glokta himself, and the fact that she is his daughter adds an ironic dimension that Abercrombie handles without being heavy-handed about it. She is the venture capitalist of her world: extracting maximum value from the industrial transformation, funding the mills that are displacing the workers, entirely clear-eyed about the human cost of what she is doing, and entirely willing to pay that cost because she has decided that success is worth it.

What makes her fascinating rather than simply a portrait of cynical capitalism is that her clarity is not certainty. She knows what she is doing. She has not convinced herself that her mills are good for the workers. She has made a calculation, and she lives with the calculation. That self-awareness, which in a moral character might produce restraint, in Savine produces a kind of doubled commitment: she knows what she is, so she might as well be it completely.

Her arc across the trilogy — through The Trouble with Peace and The Wisdom of Crowds — becomes one of the most sustained character studies in contemporary fantasy, and A Little Hatred is where it begins: with a woman who thinks she can manage the forces she is helping to unleash, and who is about to discover what management costs when the forces are larger than she estimated.

Where to Start with Abercrombie

The Age of Madness trilogy makes multiple entry points possible. New readers who begin with A Little Hatred will follow the story comfortably; readers who begin with the First Law trilogy will find the Age of Madness trilogy enriched immeasurably. For readers who want to encounter Abercrombie’s work in the most rewarding order, the recommended sequence is: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings, then Best Served Cold, The Heroes, Red Country, and finally the Age of Madness trilogy from A Little Hatred.