Red Country is the third of Abercrombie’s stand-alone books, after Best Served Cold and The Heroes. While all three books can be read in isolation they are based in the same world as The First Law trilogy and feature some well-loved characters.

Abercrombie draws, in part, on his experience as a film editor when writing and he has likened Best Served Cold to a gangster/revenge movie set in something like a Machiavellian renaissance Italy, and The Heroes to a big-picture war film like Waterloo or A Bridge Too Far. His new book, Red Country, with its air of ‘narrowed eyes’ and ‘clenched jaws’, is firmly set in the fantasy equivalent of a good western.