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Content snapshot
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Violence
Very heavy
Very graphic battle and raid violence throughout; executions; Cornwell does not spare the reader
Language
Some
Some strong language
Sexual Content
Some
Some adult sexual content in the period setting
Substance Use
Some
Heavy mead-drinking as period social texture
Emotional Intensity
A lot
The specific grief of building something that you know will fall; the gap between Arthur's legend and the difficult, mortal man who made it
What this book is about
Derfel Cadarn is a Saxon orphan raised among the Britons, who grows up to become one of Arthur's warriors. This is his account — written in old age from a monastery — of what actually happened in the fifth century when Britain was falling apart and a warlord named Arthur tried to hold it together. Cornwell strips away the courtly romance of Camelot and replaces it with mud, betrayal, and the particular brutality of post-Roman Britain. The first Warlord Chronicles novel is one of the finest historical novels of its era: gritty, emotionally honest, and with an Arthur who is heroic in the ways that actually matter in a crisis, which are not the ways the songs describe.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
very graphic historical violence
first of the Warlord Chronicles trilogy
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