Lev Grossman

“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 and Iron Flame The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Magicians trilogy returns with a triumphant reimagining of the King Arthur legend for the new millennium A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find that he’s too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive. They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, from the edges of the stories, 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. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance. But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords lay siege to Camelot and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell, and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past. The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, full of duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It also sheds a fresh light on Arthur’s Britain, a diverse, complex nation struggling to come to terms with its bloody history. The Bright Sword is a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, who are looking for a way to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves.

A Novel of King Arthur

The Bright Sword

Fable

Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled onto the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.

Britain was a wounded land, cloven in two, British and Roman, pagan and Christian, Stone and Grail, north and south, old and new. It was born in blood and grief and greed, divided eternally against itself, its different natures so mixed it could never extricate itself from itself. No miracle would erase that wound either. But Britain didn’t need a miracle, or a perfect knight, or even God. It would heal all on its own, slowly, the hard way. It would always be a scarred land, a complicated land, but complicated was not the same as broken. It would never be pure or perfect, but it might still one day be whole.

The Bright Sword quotes

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