First and Only

First and Only, published in 1999, is the novel that began Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts, arguably the definitive military-fiction series of Warhammer 40,000 and a cornerstone of Black Library's reputation. Where much of the setting's fiction follows the transhuman Space Marines, Abnett fixes his attention on the mortals of the Astra Militarum, the countless ordinary men and women of the Imperial Guard on whose blood the survival of humanity actually rests.

The regiment at the heart of the series is the Tanith First-and-Only, and their origin is a small tragedy that colours everything after it. During the chaotic founding of the regiment, their forest homeworld of Tanith was overrun and destroyed, leaving the survivors the last of their kind, soldiers with no home to return to, only the next warzone. Nicknamed the Ghosts for their skill at stealth and reconnaissance, they are led by Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt, an unusual officer who wields both political and military authority and who, unfashionably, regards his troops' lives as worth protecting.

Abnett structures this first book as much around intrigue as combat. Alongside the trench-level fighting there is a poisonous rivalry within the Imperial command itself, as a rival general schemes against Gaunt, and the plot turns on betrayal, ambition, and the lethal politics of an army where a fellow officer can be as dangerous as the enemy. Interwoven flashbacks fill in Gaunt's past and the fall of Tanith, giving the newcomer everything they need without a word of exposition dump.

The series' enduring appeal is its ensemble. Even in this opening volume, Abnett sketches a cast of enlisted men and junior officers, the loyal Colonel Corbec, the sardonic and dangerous Major Rawne, the gifted sniper Mad Larkin, and many more, whose frictions and loyalties make the vast galactic conflict feel intimate and personal. Readers frequently reach for comparisons like "Sharpe in space" or a grimdark Band of Brothers, and both capture the mixture of hard soldiering, camaraderie, and sudden loss that defines the books.

Tonally, First and Only is unglamorous by design: mud, exhaustion, bureaucratic cruelty, and the small acts of courage that keep a unit alive. Yet it never collapses into mere bleakness, because the gallows humour and hard-won victories give it real heart. Crucially, Abnett is willing to kill characters the reader has come to love, and that willingness lends every later triumph genuine stakes.

The novel is the first movement of the wider Sabbat Worlds Crusade, a decades-long campaign to reclaim a star cluster from the forces of Chaos, chronicled across the whole series. As the entry point to one of the range's best-loved sagas, and a complete story in its own right, First and Only is a natural place to begin.