Sharp Ends — Stories from the World of the First Law

Sharp Ends Review

There is a particular pleasure in returning to a world you already love, and Sharp Ends is built almost entirely around that pleasure. This 2016 collection gathers thirteen short stories set in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world, weaving together pieces that had appeared in anthologies and limited editions with several written specifically for the book. It is not a novel, it is not a starting point, and it never pretends to be either. What it is, instead, is a sustained victory lap through one of modern fantasy’s most distinctive settings, narrated in the dry, blood-flecked voice that has made Abercrombie one of the genre’s most imitated stylists.

If you have read The Blade Itself and the standalones that followed it — Best Served Cold, The Heroes, Red Country — then Sharp Ends slots neatly into the spaces between them. If you have not, the collection will read like a stack of footnotes to books you have never opened. That distinction matters more here than it does for almost any other entry in Abercrombie’s bibliography, and it is the single most important thing a prospective reader should understand before buying.

The Javre and Shevedieh Thread

The connective tissue of the collection, and easily its best material, is the recurring partnership between Shevedieh, the self-described best thief in Styria, and Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp, a hulking, immortal-seeming swordswoman with an ego the size of a city wall. Their stories — “Some Desperado” introduces the world’s tone, while “Two’s Company,” “Skipping Town” and others chart the pair’s chaotic misadventures — function as a buddy comedy soaked in arterial spray. Shevedieh wants a quiet life and a steady relationship; Javre wants glory, violence and the last word. The friction between them is sharp, the banter is genuinely funny, and the action is staged with Abercrombie’s usual gleeful cruelty.

What makes the Javre-and-Shevedieh strand work is that it has an arc. Read in sequence, these stories accumulate into something close to a serialized novella, and they could comfortably anchor a book of their own. They are the clearest demonstration that Abercrombie can do the short form well rather than merely tolerably — that compression sharpens his wit rather than blunting it.

Cameos Across the Timeline

The rest of the collection is a series of guest appearances. We get a young Sand dan Glokta before the events that broke him — arrogant, beautiful, insufferable, and all the more chilling because we know what is coming. We spend time with Shenkt, the unsettling eater from Best Served Cold, and with Curnden Craw, the decent man trying to do the right thing in a world that punishes it, familiar from The Heroes. Logen Ninefingers and the Bloody-Nine surface as well, and there are smaller walk-ons scattered throughout that long-time readers will clock with a smile.

These pieces are where the collection’s “for fans only” nature is most obvious. Encountering a younger Glokta is electric if you know his fate and inert if you do not. The stories trade heavily on dramatic irony and recognition, and that currency only has value if you have already invested in the novels. For the right reader, though, these glimpses are a delight: they extend the timeline, fill gaps, and offer fresh angles on characters whose major arcs are already complete.

The Inevitable Unevenness

Every story collection is uneven, and Sharp Ends is no exception. A few of the shorter entries feel less like finished stories and more like sketches or deleted scenes — atmospheric, well written, but slight. Because a number of the pieces were published previously, some dedicated fans will arrive having already read them, which softens the sense of discovery. The book is at its weakest when it leans on a single grim joke or a single nasty twist without the room to build toward it, and at its strongest when it gives a character enough space to breathe.

It is worth saying that even the lesser stories are carried by Abercrombie’s prose. His narration is reliably quotable, his violence is choreographed with unnerving clarity, and his cynicism is leavened by an unexpected tenderness toward characters who keep trying to be better in a world that makes that impossible. That voice is the throughline that holds a structurally loose book together.

Who Should Read It

The verdict on Sharp Ends is genuinely simple. Newcomers should not begin here; they should read The Blade Itself and let the world earn their loyalty first. Lapsed or casual readers will find it pleasant but inessential. But for committed First Law fans — the readers who have followed Logen, Glokta, Monza and Craw across the whole sprawling saga — this is a generous, frequently delightful supplement that deepens the world and adds a terrific new double act to its roster. As a coda, a gap-filler and a showcase for Abercrombie’s short-form chops, it earns its place on the shelf beside the novels.

It is, in short, exactly what it sets out to be: not the main course, but a satisfying plate of sharp little knives for people who already know how this world cuts.

Reading Order and Context

Because Sharp Ends draws on the entire span of the First Law saga, the ideal time to read it is after you have finished the major books. The original trilogy — The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings — establishes the characters whose cameos give the collection its emotional charge. The standalone novels that followed, particularly Best Served Cold and The Heroes, introduce Shenkt and Curnden Craw, both of whom recur here. Read in that order, Sharp Ends becomes a kind of bonus disc: extra footage, alternate angles, and a few entirely new scenes that enrich the picture without demanding that the reader reorganize everything they thought they knew.

A handful of the stories also reward attention to chronology. Watching a young, swaggering Glokta before his ruin only lands if you carry the memory of the broken Inquisitor he becomes, and the same dramatic irony colors several other entries. Abercrombie trusts his readers to do that mental arithmetic, and the trust is part of the fun.

The Pleasures of the Short Form

One underrated virtue of the collection is how clearly it demonstrates what Abercrombie can do with limited space. Freed from the demands of a sprawling plot, he leans on his sharpest tools: a memorable voice, a vicious set piece, a final line that twists the knife. The compression suits him. Several stories are essentially extended jokes with a body count, and they work precisely because there is no room for anything to overstay its welcome. The grimness is concentrated, the comedy is quicker, and the brutality arrives with a brisk efficiency that the longer books, for all their merits, sometimes dilute.

The collection is therefore an interesting object lesson in an author’s range. A reader who knows Abercrombie only as the architect of doorstop epics may be surprised by how nimble he can be at this scale, and how willing he is to simply have fun within his own bleak universe.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A fan-pleasing grimdark sampler whose Javre-and-Shevedieh stories shine, best enjoyed after the First Law trilogy rather than before it.