The book of Merlyn : the unpublished conclusion to The once and future king

Featuring a new foreword by Gregory Maguire, the bestselling author of Wicked, this long-lost conclusion to The Once and Future King was a New York Times bestseller and has sold 150,000 copies. The long-lost conclusion to The Once and Future King , in which King Arthur faces his final battle against his son. This magical account of King Arthur's last night on earth, rediscovered in a collection of T. H. White's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list following its publication in 1977. While preparing for his final, fatal battle with his bastard son, Mordred, Arthur returns to the Animal Council with Merlyn, where the deliberations center on ways to abolish war. More self-revealing than any other of White's books, Merlyn shows his mind at work as he agonized over whether to join the fight against Nazi Germany while penning the epic that would become The Once and Future King . The Book of Merlyn has been cited as a major influence by such illustrious writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, J. K. Rowling, Helen Macdonald, Neil Gaiman, and Lev Grossman. "Arriving from beyond the curve of time and apparently from the grave, The Book of Merlyn stirs its own pages, saying, wait: you didn't get the whole story. . . . It gives us a final glimpse of those two immortal characters, Wart and Merlyn, up close, slo-mo, with a considered and affectionate scrutiny. The book is an elegiac posting from a master storyteller of the twentieth century. Its reissue in our next century is just as welcome as when it first arrived forty years ago. . . . Certainly the moral questions about the military use of force perplex the world still. . . . The efficacy of treaties, the trading of insults among the potentates of the day, the testing of weapons, the weaponizing of trade—these strategies are still front and center. Rather terrifyingly so. We do well to revisit what that old schoolteacher of children, Merlyn, has been trying to point out to us about power and responsibility." —Gregory Maguire, bestselling author of Wicked , from the foreword "Such a small thing, The Book of Merlyn , to hold so much. Joyful and despairing, heartbreaking, yet full of hope. As wonderful and fearful to read today as it was when I first found it in 1978. And the world has as much need of it today as it did then—more, perhaps. But will the world be ready to listen?" —Mercedes Lackey, New York Times –bestselling author of the Valdemar and Elves on the Road series The old King faces the final challenge of his reign. Has he the strength to see it off--or will his lifetime's work be destroyed by his own son? As he contemplates the battle, Arthur is joined by his old friend, Merlyn, who--as unpredictably as ever--shows him that there could yet be cause for cheer if only manking would learn from its mistakes "MY FATHER made me a wooden castle big enough to get into, and he fixed real pistol barrels beneath its battlements to fire a salute on my birthday, but made me sit in front the first night-that deep Indian night-to receive the salute, and I, believing I was to be shot, cried."