Cygnus is a strange character with his left arm that wasn’t an arm but the pure white wing of a swan. I also liked the storytelling in the novel – it’s not only Cygnus, the storyteller but each character has a tale to tell, some obviously tall stories, mingling magic and myth.

However, they are thrown out of the pub where they were staying and forced to move on after trouble with the locals. Camelot thought they would be safe there as the pestilence would not reach it before the winter frosts came killing off the plague. The shrine had become a popular place of pilgrimage after Sir John Schorne’s death in 1313. He was the rector of North Marston and had discovered a well, the waters of which were reputed to have miraculous healing powers. They make their way from Kilmington on the south coast through Thornfalcon in Somerset (where incidentally we stayed last year in an old farmhouse) heading north to North Marston in Buckinghamshire seeking the shrine of Sir John Schorne. Some secrets are not that well hidden and I’d guessed them all before the end of the book. Camelot is an unreliable narrator.Īs you would expect from the title the members of the group, a conjuror, a one-armed storyteller, a musician and his apprentice, a young couple on the run, a mid-wife and a strange child who can read the runes are all liars, with secrets that gradually exposed as they journey on. This Camelot is no exception, scarred and with only one eye, pedalling relics such as skeins of Mary Magdalene’s hair, “white milk of the Virgin Mary in tiny ampoules no bigger than her nipples” and “hair from the very ass that bore our blessed Lord into Jerusalem”. A “camelot” in medieval times was a person who also carried news and had a reputation for trading in goods that were not always genuine.

Set in England in 1348 it tells the tale of a group of people fleeing across the country as the plague moves inland from the ports. Company of Liars: a novel of the plague by Karen Maitland is a great yarn.

A company of liars