Growing up in the Middle East, I’ve met all kinds of moral ambiguity. There’s a lot to say about it. How both sides think they’re right, how the ends justify the means and all that. Then there are the consequences. Even the winners often lose things. So I’ve set out to write about grey characters! About people who do bad things for the greater good, and how their life turns up after. And if you like the trope as much as I do, check the recs!
We have a man of the law who keeps asking himself why does he interrogate people, why so harshly. Then there’s a fighter who’s too invested in his looks. And a wizard who may seem good, but he uses his magic in brutal, stomach-turning ways.
All of this is fascinating to follow. Each character like this comes with a lot of room to grow, and we see them learn and adapt, while also sometimes doing what needs to be done. There’s good and bad in all of them, like all of us.
Also, Abercrombie’s prose is incredibly instinctive. Every paragraph reads with a natural rhythm because it’s easy to hear the author’s tone from the choice of words and punctuations.
Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and increasingly bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer extraordinaire, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.
Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Vain, shallow, selfish and self-obsessed, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men.
This is a multiplayer chess game, each side with their own agenda. Some play for love, others for revenge, others just to survive.
It’s a treat to cheer for one side, only to find out we chose wrong. No side is pure good, and no side is pure evil. They’re all just people, and it’s impossible to cheer for only one person when in each chapter, someone else does something amazing or terrible.
The best part about this book is the wisdom. Every character clings to their own principles, and the author chooses the best words to describe these principles. Like, a dwarf who’s principle is “Never forget what you are. Wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you.”
HBO's hit series A GAME OF THRONES is based on George R R Martin's internationally bestselling series A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, the greatest fantasy epic of the modern age. A GAME OF THRONES is the first volume in the series.
'Completely immersive' Guardian
'When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground'
Summers span decades. Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun.
From the fertile south, where heat breeds conspiracy, to the vast and savage eastern lands, all the way to the frozen…
On a foggy morning in New York City, a man and a woman run into each other, literally. The man, a writer, invites the woman, an artist, for coffee. They married just two months later. And four years later, their marriage is crumbling. On a foggy morning in New York…
It’s unspoken, but Way of Kings is filled with morally grey characters. We begin with an assassin who hates killing and move on to meet many others.
The best part is that we fall in love with the characters first. They amaze us in their courage and skills, and only later we learn who they really are:
They’re not good people. They’re totally broken, haunted by the things they’d done.
Many recommend this book for the magic system, for the epic world building, for the wisdom that we can take home after we’re done, but I recommend it for the grey characters. It really tests the reader’s ability to forgive.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, Book One of the Stormlight Archive begins an incredible new saga of epic proportion.
Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.
It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and…
The army needs young, bright minds to help it understand the enemy. But the higher-ups forget that they’re dealing with kids, and so the borders between good and bad become blurry.
Is it right to isolate a kid in order to make him better?
Is it right to go to war in order to prevent the next one?
Any reader of grey characters will enjoy this book. It’s short, tight, and it packs a punch that makes you question everything you’ve ever done. Everything you’ve ever supported. And it does that with a cast of many ethnicities and creative setups – like a training room that simulates very well a battle in space.
Orson Scott Card's science fiction classic Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut―young Ender is the Wiggin drafted…
“A non-stop action thrill ride of fantasy meets sci-fi meets cyberpunk.”
Camber Maypole was human once, an avid climber and chief medical officer aboard the Vera Rubin, a colony ship headed for a distant planet. But the day before launch, she was scrubbed for "insubordination." Against her will, her consciousness…
If you want a break from fantasy and sci-fi, and you love a book with morally grey characters, then this is it.
Beartown is a town that survives on hockey. The kids play it, the grown-ups work in anything related, and just like in sports, both sides consider themselves the good side in every action they take.
We follow the manager of the hockey club as he must make impossible decisions, then the players, each making their own mistakes. We see villains grow from a place that we can understand, and we see good people making bad calls because no one can be perfect all the time.
And most importantly, we see how sometimes, no choice is the right choice. Especially for the victim.
Nye joined the witch-hunters for revenge - to take them down from the inside. But it took 15 years for an opportunity to reveal itself. 15 years of taking on as many missions possible, so he could save a few where others wouldn’t have.
Now Nye’s mantle is stained by the blood of countless innocent witches. He did save some, but his sanity hangs by a thread. Joined with a few young witches that he’d kept hidden, he’ll try to put an end to the tyranny, to the slaughter, and to avenge the dead. But even if he’ll succeed, it may not suffice to purge the voices from his head.
In the first century, Rome’s celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent -…
Lea's second novel chronicles the unlikely friendship of Ivy-educated George Mayes and elderly Maine woodsman Evan Butcher. It memorializes the all but vanished oral culture from which Evan derives; it also plumbs the depths of addiction and the glories and challenges of recovery. Evocations of the natural world are lyrical…
