Company of Liars

✍ Scribed by Maitland, Karen

• Book ID: 108136367
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 270 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780440338833

✦ Synopsis

From Booklist
Imagine a sinister version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, overlaid with a touch of And Then There Were None. Far from the royal court’s pageantry, nine outcasts form an unlikely band that, beginning on Midsummer’s Day, 1348, journeys across England in an attempt to outrun the Black Plague. Camelot, a disfigured peddler of fake relics, narrates; others include an expectant young couple, an Italian minstrel and apprentice, an ill-tempered magician, an herbalist, a storyteller with a swan’s wing for an arm, and an albino child rune reader whose predictions are uncannily prescient. Each reveals his story; each hides a dark secret that proves his undoing. Maitland excels at describing the bleak, devastated landscape of a pestilence-torn country, with its rampant famine and superstitious, terrified inhabitants, although the pace approaches that of the travelers, trudging endlessly through the mud and muck. Likewise, some revelations are signposted too clearly. But interspersed in the cheerless realism, there’s much to absorb about medieval folk customs, garments, guilds, and religion. These details, plus the intriguing characters and burgeoning suspense, keep pages turning. --Sarah Johnson