June 18, 2026 · By Bernard Cornwell
Bernard Cornwell and Jonathan Keeble close out the Warlord Chronicles with Excalibur, and if the trilogy has been building toward a reckoning, this is where it arrives — not as triumph, but as something far more complicated and far more honest. The Saxons press harder than ever, Christianity tightens its grip on a Britain exhausted by war, and Arthur’s fragile alliance strains under betrayals both old and new. But the real battle in Excalibur isn’t fought with swords. It’s fought over whether the old gods — and the man who has staked everything on them — still have a place in the world at all.
That man is Merlin, and this is the book where Cornwell finally turns the full weight of the story on him. For two novels he’s been the trickster sorcerer pulling strings from the margins, equal parts mischief and menace. Here, Cornwell asks a harder question: does Merlin actually have the fortitude to see his magic through, or has he spent decades performing a faith he’s no longer sure he holds? His self-doubt is corrosive, and it’s compounded by something he can barely admit — his love for Arthur and for Derfel, which he’s come to see as a liability, a tether to the human world that pulls him away from the gods he’s trying to resurrect. His relationship with Nimue, always volatile, curdles further here, and watching Merlin choose between the people he loves and the power he craves is the emotional spine of the book.
Cornwell dramatizes the theme of prophecy and “the way of the gods” beautifully through Taliesin, the seer and bard Derfel meets for the first time, and the exchange that introduces him is one of the best in the trilogy:
“‘You see the future?’ I asked Taliesin. ‘He foresaw victory today,’ Merlin said, ‘and he knew of Cuneglas’s death a month ago, though he didn’t scry that a useless Saxon lump would come and steal all my cheese.’ He snatched the cheese back from me. ‘I suppose now,’ he said, ‘that you want him to forecast your future, Derfel?’ ‘No, Lord.’ ‘Quite right,’ Merlin said, ‘always better not to know the future. Everything ends in tears, that’s all there is to it.'”
It’s a perfect Merlin moment — sly, funny, and quietly devastating, the joke and the despair arriving in the same breath. That’s the tension running through the whole novel: a world that wants certainty, prophecy, gods who answer, set against Merlin’s own hard-won suspicion that knowing the future would only make the grief arrive sooner.
The subplots Cornwell weaves around this are just as rich. Derfel’s relationship with his Saxon father, Aelle, gives the novel some of its most unexpected tenderness, a reminder that blood ties cut across the war’s tidy battle lines. Guinevere is granted something like a path toward redemption, though Cornwell, characteristically, never lets her off easily for it. And Lancelot’s arc closes out exactly as his character has demanded all along — vanity meeting consequence. None of these threads feel like padding; they all bear on the trilogy’s larger question of what people owe to honor, to oath, and to each other when the gods stay silent.
Jonathan Keeble’s narration is everything it’s been across the trilogy — muscular, mournful, precisely attuned to Cornwell’s rhythms — and he’s particularly good with Merlin and Taliesin, finding the dry wit and the genuine ache underneath it without ever letting one undercut the other. The prophecy and visions material could easily tip into the portentous in lesser hands, but Keeble keeps it grounded, treating the supernatural with the same wary skepticism Derfel himself brings to it. By the time the novel reaches its end — bittersweet, elegiac, closing on a note of mystery and hope rather than resolution — Keeble has earned every bit of that ambiguity.
Excalibur is a worthy close to one of the finest historical fiction trilogies in audio, and the Cornwell-Keeble partnership ends exactly as it should: unsentimental, unresolved, and unforgettable.