DEATH OF KING ARTHUR (FABER) (PB)

The Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand-line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur. Simon Armitage is already the master of this alliterative music, as his earlier version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight so exuberantly showed. His new translation restores a neglected masterpiece of story-telling, bringing vividly to life the cut-and-thrust of warfare and politics, its mixture of ruthlessness and restraint.