Before They Are Hanged

Before They Are Hanged is a fantasy novel by the British writer Joe Abercrombie, first published in 2007.

Three campaigns run side by side. Superior Glokta, a torturer who can barely walk without a stick, is handed a city to defend that is surrounded by enemies, riddled with traitors and abandoned by the man who held it before him, and the allies he is given cannot be trusted. In the north the Northmen have spilled over the border of Angland, spreading fire and death through a frozen country, and Prince Ladisla means to drive them back and take the glory with an army that is the worst equipped and worst trained in the world. Bayaz, the First of the Magi, takes a small company east through the ruins of the past, and among the travellers are a woman loathed across the South, a man feared throughout the North and a rich young man interested in nobody but himself.

The novel keeps moving between a siege, a retreat and a journey into country that has been emptied out, and the three groups never meet. Its subject headings name kings and rulers, imaginary wars and battles, and war and military fiction.