Malice

Young Corban has spent his life watching other boys learn the sword and spear, and he longs to stand among the warriors who guard his king's realm. That day arrives sooner than he would wish. The Banished Lands remember an age when men and giants fought until the earth ran dark, and the broken fortresses of the giant clans still scar the land. Now the stones weep blood, giants stir again and great wyrms have been sighted.

Drawing on mythology and the Iron Age, this first novel in John Gwynne's The Faithful and the Fallen grows from one boy's coming of age into the shadow of a war in which angels and demons make the world their battlefield. Conn Iggulden has praised it as getting faster and more fascinating by the page.