A vicious little knife blade of a novel - and I mean that in the best possible way. Our protagonist, one Honorous Jorg Ancrath (though he generally just goes by Jorg) is horribly scarred inside and out by legitimately horrific traumas, and it has left him brimful with hate and rage - emotions he expresses with the savage indiscrimination of a stoat. When we meet him, he is roving as the leader (at the startling age of 13; Jorg is not merely vicious as a stoat but sharp as a tack - or perhaps more aptly sharp as a razor - as well, making him a singularly dangerous individual indeed) of a band of "road brothers". That is to say, unrepentant bandits, murdering, pillaging, and raping their way about the countryside and loving it. 
 This is hardly the limit of Jorg's ambition, however. Indeed, there hardly seems to be one. He's vowed to be a king by 15 (with his presently-abandoned-but-soon-reclaimed princely heritage figuring, naturally), and to reunite the empire that's splintered into a hundred fragments all mainly preoccupied with their endless grinding war for advantage against one another - by becoming Emperor of all of them, of course. Watching his single-minded pursuit of his ambition with all his cleverness and ruthlessness both is entertaining as hell - Jorg's gifts for cleverness, lateral thinking, and applied ruthlessness and cruelty are stretched to their limits as he strives to achieve the seemingly impossible when anyone else would concede themselves hopelessly over their heads. 
 The other strengths of the novel are multiple. The prose is clever, original, and occasionally blackly funny, while the characterization is vivid - Jorg in particular is riveting to watch as he constantly wavers between (or perhaps straddles) the line between antihero and outright villain protagonist. The setting exceeds the usual as well - while at first it seems we may be seeing just another pseudo-medieval fantasy, it's seen soon enough that this is the ruins of the post-apocalypse of a technologically advanced society. So whence the magic (and the shadowy players who emerge to complicate Jorg's life more)? Well, buy the sequel and find out more... I did. :-P