Character from The First Law by Joe Abercrombie
A Union soldier trying to leave violence behind — a family man whose rage sits just below the surface, proving that you can take the man out of the war but you can't take the war out of the man.
Broad speaks carefully, the way a man handles unstable explosives. He knows what lives inside him — the berserker, the killer, the soldier who enjoyed it too much. He has a wife and daughter he loves with genuine tenderness, and the gap between that tenderness and his capacity for violence is where his story lives. He gets pulled into the Valbeck uprising, then into the Breaker revolution, then into state violence for the new regime — each step taking him further from the family man he wants to be and closer to the weapon the world keeps making him. He's Logen's spiritual successor: another man who can't outrun what he is.
Massive and weathered with a laborer's build and a soldier's scars. His hands are too large for gentle work. His face is creased with the effort of staying calm. Everything about him suggests contained explosion.
Also known as: Broad, Gunnar Broad