Hugh Cook is quite under-appreciated as an author, probably due to the form that his work took in the USA.
His huge "The W- & the W-" 10-book series is collectively titled "Chronicles of an age of Darkness". Each novel of the Chronicles was originally printed in the UK, and the books I own are from these printings - all ten of them. At least some of these books were also printed in the USA, a little later, and under different names.
The US printings were hideous. For example, the lead character in his third book (The Women and the Warlords) is Yen Olass, a woman in her mid/late thirties. Her background is that she is one of the few survivors of a race (somewhat like the Lapps), whose homeland was invaded and laid to waste when Yen was a child. Yen herself saw her family killed, and was pack-raped by soldiers. She was sold as a slave, and finally given to a not-entirely-friendly order of Oracles whose induction involved fairly thorough genital mutilation. Despite this harsh history, Yen manages to make something of herself, and her personal outlook is not entirely bitter - she can be quite whimsical at times.
Yen is described as being big and stocky, and she spends most of the book heavily rugged up in bearskin, for simple survival - she lives in a wintery land. She successfully impersonates a male warrior for several weeks, and is just as physically strong and capable as the average male. On a couple of occasions, she knocks men out with her fists, and she withstands a fair amount of physical damage throughout the course of the story.
The US edition of this book was titled "The Oracle", and Yen is pictured as a lithe-yet-curvy chick in a chain mail bikini. The illustration also features a big glowy and mystic-looking orb, and the total effect is that the book looks like a Heroic Fantasy / sword-and-sorcery slasher. Presumably they were attempting to appeal to the same market that buys Conan stories, which is, IMO, a completely witless marketing decision for such a novel.
Another shameful decision was to chop the already small second book in half. The edition I have is called The Wordsmiths and the Warguild, and, whilst it is possibly the weakest of the series, it is quite a decent story. The first half of the US edition is called The Questing Hero, and it simply ends halfway through the story, with an advertisement for the second instalment.
I think these books deserved a lot better treatment, and I am sad that they are out of print. I adored the series because I found his approach to be quite refreshing... the Chronicles are about believable characters behaving in a highly realistic manner, whilst living in a mildly fantastical setting. Reality intrudes in a number of ways that would never be allowed in a David Eddings novel.
Besides the Chronicles, Hugh has written a few other books including The Shift, said to be similar in style to the Chronicles, The Homecoming Man, and Cracked Wheat and Other Stories.