The Heroes

by Joe Abercrombie

Wait—I know what you're thinking. But hear me out: if you haven't read the First Law trilogy that precedes The Heroes, you're missing the character arcs that make this battle truly devastating. Abercrombie plants seeds in The Blade Itself that don't fully bloom until The Heroes, and revisiting the earlier books will give you that rare pleasure of understanding how deliberately he's been playing the long game with Gorst, Calder, and the entire Northern political landscape.

by R. F. Kuang

Kuang does what Abercrombie does—strips away the romance from warfare and shows you the grinding, morally corrosive reality of it—but through a protagonist who's actively complicit in atrocities rather than just observing them. Like Gorst, your main character is addicted to violence and power, but Kuang forces you to reckon with the cost in ways that are even more uncomfortable than Abercrombie's cynicism.

by James Thomas Flexner

This has the same DNA as The Heroes—a character willing to betray everyone around them to achieve power, told with surgical precision about how that actually works—but Dickinson adds economic and imperial systems into the mix. Where Abercrombie shows you scheming at a personal level, Dickinson shows you how individual ambitions get weaponized by larger structures. The battle sequences are fewer, but the strategic maneuvering will feel familiar.

by George MacDonald

This is your curveball—a genuinely kind protagonist navigating court intrigue and institutional resistance, which sounds like the opposite of what you just read. But Addison writes court politics with the same meticulous attention to faction, honor, and the gap between what people say and what they want that Abercrombie does. If you're craving the political scheming without the cynicism, this scratches that itch while offering something tonally fresh.