The Once and Future King

A fierce and damaged man, T. H. White wrote about fierce and damaged people and children, and animals with a brilliant, painful innocence that has no equal in literature. He is so good at hurt and shame how did he also manage to be so funny? I have laughed at his great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life. Ursula K. Le Guin
 
Certain books offer pleasures so rich and enduring, they become part of what defines us. The Once and Future King is like that for me. It manages by some miracle to be about its own time, and a distant, legendary time, and about today. It mingles wisdom, wonderful, laugh-out-loud humor and deep sorrow while telling one of the great tales of the Western world. I envy the reader coming to it for the first time. Guy Gavriel Kay
 
White took hold of the ultimate English epic and recast it in modern literary language, sacrificing none of its grandeur or its strangeness in the process, and adding in all the humor and passion that we expect from a novel. What was once as stiff and two-dimensional as a medieval tapestry becomes rich and real and devastatingly sad. Lev Grossman
 
Touching, profound, funny and tragic. Los Angeles Times
 
Richly imagined and unfailingly eloquent and entertaining, its appeal is timeless and universal. If a reader reads only one Arthurian tale, let this be it. Booklist
 
The Once and Future King is full of insights, scenes and flourishes that are really quite astonishing. The Guardian (U.K.)