I am a sucker for flawed heroes, and nobody comes more flawed than Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar. I am also a sucker for heroic men in a grand scale.... and nobody does heroic quite like Miles Vorkosigan. The heir to the bloody history  of a half-feudal, half-modern empire -- and until his cousin the Emperor Gregor produces heirs, actually in the Barrayaran line of succession -- Miles seems to make it up as he goes along,  while still holding on to those values that lie at his core: his love for Barrayar and his passionate drive to protect his own.  

Lois McMaster Bujold has created a grand Universe, populated with magnificent cast of characters.  There isn't a single cartoon hero or villain in the lot. Even Miles's dragon of a grandfather, the Count Piotr, who tries to kill him before he is born, is fully-realized, complex, fascinating.  Against this background of ghem-generals and backcountry peasants, insane princes and mad genetic scientists, the story of the Vorkosigan family and its allies plays out in true space opera style, but with superb writing and rich world-building.

I became attracted to Miles because of what he wasn't. No lantern-jawed hero he; at four-foot-nine, with bones "friable as talc,"  big-headed and slightly hunch-backed, he is decribed by people who love him as "a hyperactive little git" who is "addicted to adrenaline rushes". He is a first class military tactician, a first-class political manipulator, and a first class pain in the ass to his cousins, Gregor and Ivan, and his motley assortment of adoring followers, not to mention  his clone-brother Mark and his parents.

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