By Force Alone

Everyone thinks they know the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. But this is a historical novel with a difference.

Iconoclastic, provocative, hugely entertaining. A historical novel with a difference – as you’d expect from the award-winning author of Osama and Central Station.

There is a legend…

Britannia, AD 535

The Romans have gone. While their libraries smoulder, roads decay and cities crumble, men with swords pick over civilisation’s carcass, slaughtering and being slaughtered in turn.

This is the story of just such a man. Like the others, he had a sword. He slew until slain. Unlike the others, we remember him. We remember King Arthur.

This is the story of a land neither green nor pleasant. An eldritch isle of deep forest and dark fell haunted by swaithes, boggarts and tod-lowries, Robin-Goodfellows and Jenny Greenteeths, and predators of rarer appetite yet.

This is the story of a legend forged from a pack of self-serving, turd-gilding, weasel-worded lies told to justify foul deeds and ill-gotten gains.

This is the story – viscerally entertaining, ominously subversive and poetically profane – of a Dark Age myth that shaped a nation.

EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT BY FORCE ALONE:

‘A bloody, bravura performance, which Tidhar pulls off with graphic imagery and modern vernacular’ Guardian.

‘As eclectic as the Sword in the Stone and as ruthless as A Game of Thrones, this retelling of the whole Arthurian legend stands alongside the very best’ Daily Mail.

‘The narrative voice is deadly serious but there’s a strong undercurrent of gleefulness to the profanity, violence and otherworldly magic that makes By Force Alone a whole lot of fun to dive into’ Spectator.

‘Lavie Tidhar has crafted a punk epic on the mouldering bones of legend and jolted it to life with ten thousand volts of knowing wit and fury. By Force Alone eviscerates the complacent posturing of the Arthurian myth, explodes the well-worn conventions of the tale and from the shiny jagged pieces assembles a wholly fresh rollercoaster ride of cheap violence, vicious magic and messy human truth’ Richard Morgan.

‘A twisted Arthur retelling mixing the historical and the magical with a very modern eye. Brutal and vicious, funny, Peaky Blinders of the Round Table’ Adrian Tchaikovsky.