I'm just a little ways in to
The Ill-Made Knight by Christian Cameron right now (not to be confused with the book by T.H. White), but wanted to recommend it here to you gentlemen. It's a new novel, just published on August 1st of this year. I believe it's Christian's first medieval historical fiction. Takes place during the early Hundred Years War. Here's the synopsis from Amazon:
The Ill-Made Knight:
William Gold comes into the world as his family slides down the social ladder. His head filled with tales of chivalry, instead he is branded a thief, and must make do with being squire to his childhood friend Sir Robert, a knight determined to make a name for himself as a man at arms in France. While William himself slowly acquires the skills of knightly combat, he remains an outsider - until the Battle of Poitiers when Sir Robert is cut down by the greatest knight of the age, Sir Geoffrey de Charny, and William, his lowly squire, revenges him. But with his own knight dead, no honour accrues to William for this feat of arms, and he is forced to become a mercenary. Scavenging a mismatched set of armour from the knightly corpses, he joins one of the mercenary companies now set to pillage a defenceless France, and so begins a bloody career that sees William joining forces with the infamous Sir John Hawkwood and immersing himself in a treacherous clandestine war among the Italian city states. But paradoxically it is there, among the spies, assassins and hired killers serving their ruthless masters, that William finally discovers the true meaning of chivalry - and his destiny as a knight.
The story is thus far very engrossing, gritty, and portrays the realities between some of the ideals of chivalry vs how it may have been abused by less than honorable knights. Christian Cameron offers something very cool to historical fiction. Since he is himself a very devoted and detail oriented living history nut, he goes out of his way to get those details that we would appreciate right. I also saw it written in another review that with his historical fiction the characters seem very real. In a lot of historical fiction it feels like the author transplanted a modern character to the period of interest, but in Christian's novels the characters really portray a sense of belonging to their era. They feel right for their time.
Check it out!
