Gaunt's Ghosts

About the Gaunt's Ghosts series

Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts is grunt's-eye military science fiction set during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, the decades-long Imperial campaign to reclaim a whole sector of the galaxy from Chaos in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It follows Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt and the Tanith First-and-Only -- a light-infantry regiment recruited from a forest world destroyed on the very night they shipped out, making them the last of their kind with nothing left to go home to. Abnett's first novel, First and Only (1999), was also the very first book published under Games Workshop's Black Library imprint, and it set the template the whole series has followed since: trench-level combat, scarce resources, political infighting above the soldiers' heads, and a command structure that runs on Gaunt's personal, often reckless loyalty to the men and women under him rather than on Imperial doctrine.

What separates the series from most 40K tie-in fiction is its sustained interest in the people doing the fighting rather than in super-soldiers or grand cosmic stakes -- named Ghosts die permanently and often, campaigns drag on for volumes at a time, and Gaunt's authority is constantly undercut by rival officers and Imperial bureaucracy who see the Tanith as expendable. The series is organized into named story arcs -- the Founding, the Saint, the Lost, and the Victory -- each a multi-book campaign within the wider crusade, culminating in Anarch (2019), which closes out the Victory arc and the Sabbat Worlds Crusade's central storyline. In 2022 Abnett returned to the regiment's earlier, pre-fame history with The Vincula Insurgency, the first in a planned line of interquel 'Ghost Dossier' novels filling in gaps between the main-sequence books.

At fifteen novels plus this new prequel-set volume, Gaunt's Ghosts is Dan Abnett's best-known and most acclaimed solo work, widely regarded as one of the finest and most influential series Black Library has published.