The most recommended King Arthur books

Nia's lifelong dream is to become an avatar, one of the ruling mermaids of Atlantis. But when she is passed over for the opportunity, she must embark on a quest to prove herself. This journey takes her far beyond the sea and everything she knows to the world of dry land. Arthurian legends, mermaids, magic, Atlantis, a heroine’s journey – how can you go wrong?

Mark Twain’s King Arthur time travel novel led to numerous others.

While Twain’s novel is more of a veiled attempt to depict his own time, other authors have depicted Camelot as a utopian place and asked what the world would be like if it had not fallen. In The Forever King, a young boy, Arthur Blessing, turns out to be a reincarnated King Arthur. He travels back in time to Camelot to try to restore its past glory.

He failed in the past, but with the help of the Holy Grail, he is determined not to fail again. The novel led to two sequels. Like all these time travel novels, the goal is to change the past to create a better future. But utopias are always hard to achieve.

Merlin as the Antichrist?! 

Robert de Boron was a medieval French writer of romances who made Merlin a central figure in the story of the Arthurian world and almost the inventor of the quest for the Holy Grail.

Medieval romances are a bit of a niche read, but I want to tell everyone about this version of Merlin. The Romance of Merlin actually starts in Hell, with the demons plotting to win the ongoing battle against God by bringing about the birth of Antichrist. 

The chosen demon expresses squeamishness at the idea of seducing a human woman but does his duty – and the result is Merlin! 

These stories helped make Merlin the time-travelling superhero of later romances, and the prophet who influenced Joseph of Arimathea’s decision to come to Britain with the Grail.  

I was about seventeen, at an airport waiting for a flight to Cyprus when I picked up this book whilst browsing. Didn’t realise at the time it would change my life forever. I read it three times in two weeks, despite finding out after the first time it was the third in a trilogy. I was hooked on the blood and the battles, the brotherhood of Arthur’s soldiers, the bygone era Bernard Cornwell seemed to so effortlessly breathe back to life. I haven’t looked back since.

Before the appearance of ‘franchise’ novels set in an Arthurian world, and even before the genre of ‘fantasy writing’ had established itself, the American writer Marion Zimmer Bradley published one of the most remarkable novels about Arthurian Britain and its cast of characters.

Well researched and deeply imbued with the colours of a powerfully-imagined world, the novel refocuses the events of Arthur’s life from the point of view of the women who surround him, especially Morgaine (Morgan le Fay) and Igraine, Arthur’s mother.

This was the first feminist retelling of the Arthurian story, one in which Arthur was no longer the focus of the action, and when I first read the novel I found the audacity of this inversion captivating. 

Mentions of the historical Arthur—a war duke, not a king—date him to the late 5th and early 6th centuries. Merlin’s dates are fuzzier. Whyte sets this tale of Merlin’s origins in Roman Britain, consistent with the historical Arthur, as the withdrawal of Rome’s legions leaves the colony subject to invasion and insurrection. Young Publius, nicknamed Merlin, is a soldier and a blacksmith. He and his cousin Uther battle to keep Britannia from crumbling around them as Roman society is beset by external marauders and internal strife. Through it all, Merlin is intrigued by stories of a stone that fell from the sky—an iron-rich meteorite that has rendered steel, and which Merlin can forge into an incredible sword. In this richly developed story, Merlin is not a druid or a sorcerer, but a smith.

My inner child is still captivated by the Lilliputian world of T.H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose every time I read it. I don't know why the idea of discovering a secret miniature kingdom is so alluring: I think it may have something to do with my love for dollhouses when I was a child. T.H. White was best known for The Once and Future King and The Sword in the Stone, based on the Arthurian legends; he was a master at taking an old story (Gulliver's Travels in the case of Mistress Masham's Repose) and making it truly his own.

For any serious Arthurian fan, an understanding of the Welsh origins of Arthur is essential, and yet unpicking these early threads of Arthurian material can be difficult.

This book provides the perfect guide, a series of accessible articles about the various stories and poems that circulated in Wales before the fourteenth century. As someone who has studied medieval Welsh literature in depth, I enjoy sharing knowledge of this fascinating culture with others, and this book opens a door into the world of early Wales where Arthur first took shape as a legendary battle warrior.

Arthur’s Welsh origins have perhaps attracted more extremist views than any other part of the legends, so this book, based on documentary evidence, is a welcome corrective to the more far-fetched speculations about the origins of Arthur.

We all know what happens when Death takes a holiday, but what happens when Death is given notice? 

Dismissed from the only job he’s ever known, Death must decide how to spend the time he has left. Taking on the random name “Bill Door,” he offers his talents scything hay, “one blade at a time, one time, one blade.” Death is a recurring character in Discworld and has the casually brutal forbearance of someone who has seen it all.

Seen, but not experienced and it is the dawning comprehension that I love most about Reaper Man: “[Death] wondered if he’d ever felt wind and sunlight before. Yes, he’d felt them, he must have done. But he’d never experienced them like this; the way wind pushed at you, the way the sun made you hot. The way you could feel Time passing. Carrying you with it.”

This book forms the first of a trilogy by Cornwell, re-telling the Arthurian legend, but setting it in the gritty, muddy, dangerous world of 6th Century Britain.

All the major characters are here; Merlin, Lancelot (brilliantly described as a narcissistic, scheming coward) and of course, Arthur. However, Arthur is not really the main character in the novel. It is told, instead, by one of Arthur’s warriors, Derfel. And it’s with Derfel that we get the usual Cornwell hero, seen in characters such as Richard Sharpe and Cornwell’s Saxon hero Uhtred of Bebbanburg.

Derfel is a likable, skilled soldier, and it’s through his eyes that we see the story of Arthur unfold. I particularly liked the characterisation Cornwell uses for the famous figures from the Arthurian legends, as he turns most of them on their head and makes them human; with the foibles and faults we all have. Arthur is often… show more.

Terence Hanbury White is famous for writing The Sword in the Stone, The Once and Future King, and The Book of Merlin, all about King Arthur and his court. But he wrote many other books, both fiction and nonfiction.

This book is a translation of a Medieval bestiary, filled with strange animals like the Unicorn, the Dragon, the Phoenix, and the Amphisbaena. As White points out, the book was not meant as a mere rainy-day diversion, but was a serious attempt to catalog the animals of the world and how they related to man and the world.

White, a believer in the high knowledge and science of the often belittle Middle Ages, provides extensive footnotes showing that many of the apparently fantastic creatures and behaviors documented in the Bestiary do, indeed, have factual roots.

The Basilisk might stem from an imperfectly understood description of the King Cobra,… show more.

The first thing that drew me to Davis’s books was that teen/dragons were the main characters. Throughout the series these teenagers with dragon abilities face many crises in faith as they battle the forces of evil. Another interesting twist is Davis used the story and characters from the King Arthur story. These characters help and hinder the teen in their efforts to save their dragon world and fight evil. The reader watches with bated breath as Billy and Bonnie fight to preserve a secret legacy and discover their place in God’s world of dragons.

I first read the tales of The Mabinogion when I was an undergraduate and their amazing otherness helped to propel me towards a career researching medieval Welsh literature.

These prose tales were composed in Welsh between 1100 and 1300. Four of the tales are linked together and are known as ‘The Four Branches of the Mabinogi’. Other tales include two original Arthurian stories, a dream vision set in the Roman British past, and three tales based on the French Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes.

In this rich mixture of genres, otherworldly women marry heroic men, warfare between Wales and Ireland destroys a generation, and Arthur strides the land as the king of the whole island of Britain. Sioned Davies’s translation is the latest and best, capturing all the drama and apparent simplicity of the original Welsh texts.

This gender-swapped retelling of King Arthur showcases a female Merlin, Emry, who packs some serious girl power. Far superior at magic than her twin brother Emmett, Emry takes his place training as the new court wizard for the adorable, bumbling Prince Arthur. I knew I was going to love this book when chapter one began with Arthur and Lancelot sneaking out of the castle to have one too many drinks at a bar and ended with Arthur getting sick all over Sir Kay’s shoes. Witty banter among lovable characters, the occasional bit of bathroom humor, and lots of magic and heart made this book one of my favorites of 2021.

In Bliss and Blunder, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table return to England as a group of entitled, insecure techbros.

It might sound unlikely, but there’s true, literary magic at work as Gosling weaves England’s best-loved legends into the fabric of our present moment. Strange, fearless, and utterly convincing, there’s fun to be had in imagining (Sir Ga)Wayne drinking in the Green Knight or rummaging through Guinevere's Instagram account – but there’s anger, too.

Beneath the mythmaking, the story of Arthur is a story of power – the way it oozes and where it pools, who it celebrates, and who it destroys. We’re still as bewitched by the myths as we ever were – and the story hasn’t changed at all. 

This has got to be one of the most underrated books I've ever read!

This is a great for those who like fantasy and/or historical fiction. There isn't tons of fantasy in it, barely any in fact, but it reads like a rich fantasy world that also has top-notch character work.

A dual perspective narrative that follows a crown prince and a merchant, we are thrown into a rich world full of drama, trading, politics, and suspense. Our two perspectives are compelling in their own ways, with interesting backstories that keep the reader engaged. It's fast-paced, with great world-building and a satisfying journey and ending.

This book has a little bit of everything and will be a sure hit for those, who, especially, enjoy intrigue, introspection on the character's part and twists and turns.

This book-length study of the magical figure of Merlin is the most authoritative account of the literary lives of Merlin, Arthur’s wizard guide, from his earliest incarnation in Welsh poetry to his reinvention in modern novels and films.

Stephen Knight, a prolific medievalist whose work is always readable and entertaining, takes Merlin’s gifts of knowledge and foresight as his theme, arguing that throughout the many versions of Merlin in literary texts, operations of power are always working to restrict and contain Merlin’s command of knowledge.

Reading this book takes you on a journey that will enrich your understanding of the Arthurian legends.

Lawhead’s tale of a struggling Oxford graduate student whisked away to a Celtic fantasy world drew me in immediately. The author superbly melded together traditional Celtic mythology with a deep spiritual connection and a crystal-clear understanding of the battle between good and evil. His characters are well-drawn, fallible yet noble, and the real story is the coming-of-age of the protagonist as he discovers more within him than he realized. Though not overtly faith-based, this novel had themes that reminded me of the Lord of the Rings and Narnia and the descriptions made me feel like I was really there. I became a fan after just one novel. 

Although magic doesn’t feature as strongly in this as the other recommendations and in the subsequent books in the series, I recommend this it cleverly disguises magic within the world, it's not showy but still believable, something which makes you think. It's also a gripping tale that connects Atlantis with the stories around King Arthur.

This was one of the first Arthurian reference books and remains one of the best.

Its comprehensive scope, covering Arthurian legends and characters across many European literatures, provides answers to all possible questions about the world of Arthur. The format of short alphabetical entries is perfect for browsing – you will find all you need to know about the Bleeding Lance or the ‘Gargantuan Chronicles’ among many other lesser-known Arthurian curiosities.

I found this book invaluable when I was preparing my own book and I still dip into it when teaching students.