Book
A Good Deliverance
First published 2024
Warwickshire, 1468. Sir Thomas Malory is seized from his garden and taken to Newgate without being told which of his many political and criminal entanglements has finally condemned him. Facing an uncertain sentence, the ageing knight begins telling the gaoler’s son the story of a life spent chasing the ideals of chivalry while repeatedly failing to live by them.
His confession moves through service in France, the Battle of Verneuil, encounters with Joan of Arc and the court of the antipope John XXIII, knighthood under Henry VI and imprisonment under Edward IV. Clements uses Malory’s unreliable, self-dramatising voice to explore how warfare, court politics and personal disgrace fed into Le Morte d’Arthur, the prose work that gave enduring English form to the legends of Arthur, Lancelot and the Round Table.
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