Empire of the North

About the Empire of the North series

Centuries after a catastrophic global war, the only functioning nation left in North America is the Empire of the North -- a rigid, class-bound society built where Canada once stood, kept running by generations of indentured servants working off debts they can never fully repay. Brendan DuBois's trilogy follows Armand, a young man born into the Empire's noble class, who begins asking the kind of questions his position was never meant to permit and draws the attention of the Empire's security apparatus as a result. The Noble Warrior sets up Armand's growing crisis of conscience and the choice it forces on him -- protect his family's status or side with the people his Empire has enslaved; The Noble Prisoner follows the brutal consequences of that choice after he's captured, interrogated and deported to a penal labor authority; The Noble Prince completes the arc as Armand, having escaped, makes his way south into the unmapped Forbidden Lands to find out what's left of the world beyond his Empire's borders.

It's a considerable departure in setting from DuBois's better-known crime and thriller work -- a self-published, ebook-only dystopian adventure trilogy -- but it carries over the same close attention to a single point-of-view character under sustained institutional pressure that runs through the Lewis Cole novels.