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The Bright Sword

By: Lev Grossman
Narrated by: Mr Nicholas Guy Smith, Lev Grossman
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Publisher's Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of the Magicians trilogy returns with a triumphant reimagining of the King Arthur legend for the new millennium.

When gifted young knight Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a place on the Round Table, he quickly discovers that he’s too late:The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table are left.

And the survivors aren’t the heroes of legend either, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill.

But it’s up to them to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance, even as God abandons Britain and the fairies and old gods are returning, led by Morgan le Fay. They must reclaim Excalibur and make this ruined world whole again.

But first they’ll have to solve the mystery of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell.

The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, who are looking for a way to forge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves.

'For anyone who’s ever craved a seat at the Round Table. Utterly enchanting.'

Rebecca Yarros, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fourth Wing

©2024 Lev Grossman (P)2024 Penguin Audio

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Strangely satisfying Arthurian rewrite

After the Magicians this is a far more robust and satisfying work. The magicians engaging as it is, left not a lot of room for sympathy toward the characters.

In this work, it is hard not to like the various contradictory nuances of life and the failings perceived or otherwise of the central characters. It has that post modernity aspect where everything is valued and evaluated through the lens of contemporary thinking, he readily admits to having stolen, borrowed and created to form the physics of his world and it works rather well I think (although flying ships and Gwenivere are not entirely explained but hey, narrative device moves the story along nicely and it’s fiction, not bloody history.

I haven’t enjoyed an Arthurian mashup since the once and future king (shows how out of touch I am but it also shows that I enjoy being absorbed by a tale and in this work Grossman succeeds in being absorbing.

I throughly enjoyed this work. You may too but I suspect that this piece will resonate with a niche that’s more niche than normal.

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