I came across Joe Abercrombie when I had lunch with some people from Orbit, the science fiction publisher, a few weeks ago, and they mentioned him. They publish Abercrombie, so their objectivity is hopelessly compromised, but I put him on my list anyway. Then I was reminded of him when I was obsessively checking the Amazon UK page for my book and I saw that you could order his and my book together, and that his book was outselling mine by like a mazillion orders of magnitude. (He and I may be the only authors in or out of Christendom to be blurbed by both Junot Diaz and George R. R. Martin.)

Abercrombie writes dark, adult fantasy, by which I mean there’s a lot of stabbing in it, and after people stab each other they sometimes have sex with each other.