Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

A Metheringham Book Club Review

The author, who now lives in Lincoln

As it says on the back of the book - 1348 The Plague has come to England. A scared trader in holy relics, a conjuror, a musician and his apprentice, a one-armed storyteller, a young couple on the run, a midwife and a rune-reading girl. A group of misfits band together to escape the plague, but in the midst lurks a curse darker and more malign than the pestilence they flee.

Camelot is the narrator and the story starts at a Midsummer Fair where he is selling holy relics. The plague is starting to take hold and claiming its first victims in England and so there is panic as people are fleeing and trying to keep ahead of the pestilence. Camelot is joined by a variety of travellers, each with a reason to become a part of the group. They all share a common aim in that they have to keep moving to avoid the plague. They all have something to hide so have built a façade of lies and implications because the truth could be as deadly as the plague itself. Each character tells his or her story, but which ones are telling the truth?

Some of the comments from the group were:

• Rather macabre but a compulsive page turner of a book.


• Compulsive read, capturing the medieval times vividly.


• There was much lawlessness and superstition, no cures. You could smell the characters coming off the page. Plenty of twists and turns in plot right up to the last page.

On the whole most people really enjoyed this book and we gave it an average score of 7 for the enjoyment and 6 for the quality of the writing.

Pauline Ventress