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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.
About the author
Lavie Tidhar's work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama and Six Lives, cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom prize winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020) and children's books such as Candy (2018) and the forthcoming A Child's Book of the Future (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London.
Summary
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.
Foreword
Iconoclastic, provocative, hugely entertaining. A historical novel with a difference - as you'd expect from the award-winning author of Osama and Central Station.
Additional text
Quite simply, By Force Alone is brilliant, thought-provoking entertainment, which reinvents events from a fictional past that resonate with a real-life, post-Brexit, Britain
Report
[An] extraordinary and vivid retelling of our national myth. Gritty revisionism is super-charged by the supernatural... 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
