Posts Tagged: Red Country

A Map for Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

A Map for Red Country by Joe Abercrombie, art by Dave Senior and Laura Brett – Click to Embiggen

Abercrombie on the map:

The Heroes was very focused in time and place, detailed, forensic almost, the ground all important – faux military history, in a sense, so the map needed to look detailed, professional and precise as well, with the positions of units added in for an extra veneer of military exactitude. This time around the story is taking place in an expanse of largely unmapped, scarcely settled wilderness so it made sense that the map be much rougher, less accurate-seeming, more woolly and suggestive without too much worry over blank spaces, a drawn on the back of a beermat by a fella with a big beard sense.

We all like a good map, don’t we? I do appreciate, too, that there is a slight red cast to the colour palette used for the map, making this, literally, a red country.

Cover Art for Red Country by Joe Abercrombie (UK)

Map by Dave Senior and Daggers by Didier Graffetaption

Yep, that’s an Abercrombie cover. Yep, still awesome. There’s also a full spread and a finalized synopsis:

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

They burned her home.

They stole her brother and sister.

But vengeance is following.

Shy South hoped to bury her bloody past and ride away smiling, but she’ll have to sharpen up some bad old ways to get her family back, and she’s not a woman to flinch from what needs doing. She sets off in pursuit with only a pair of oxen and her cowardly old stepfather Lamb for company. But it turns out Lamb’s buried a bloody past of his own, and out in the lawless Far Country, the past never stays buried.

Their journey will take them across the barren plains to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feud, duel and massacre, high into the unmapped mountains to a reckoning with the Ghosts. Even worse, it will force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, and his feckless lawyer Temple, two men no one should ever have to trust…

I’d’ve liked to have seen a different palette, since this one treds so closely to what we saw with Best Served Cold and The Heroes, but that’s really my only complaint. Great stuff, better than the US cover. A few weeks ago, I gathered together everything we know about Red Country, check it out, if you’re interested.