If what hooked you in T. H. White’s portrait of Lancelot was his relentless self-scrutiny—his self-loathing over being “ill-made,” his conflicted holiness on the Grail quest, and the way his private vows collide with Arthur’s public ideals—then you’ll revel in the intimate moral pressure of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Like Lancelot, Gawain faces a test that exposes not just skill but soul; his bargain with the Green Knight forces him to weigh honesty against survival, honor against human frailty, and to live with the scar of his choice, much as Lancelot must live with the mark of his love for Guinevere.

If you were drawn to Lancelot’s morally tangled loyalty—standing by Arthur’s vision of the Round Table even as his affair with Guinevere and the Orkney clan’s machinations (Gawain, Agravaine, Mordred) drag him into blood and betrayal—you’ll appreciate the Company’s physician-annalist Croaker, who serves dark employers while clinging to a personal code. The book mirrors the way Lancelot rescues Guinevere from the stake at terrible cost: deeds of dazzling prowess that stain the very ideals they aim to protect.

If the emotional gravity of Lancelot, Guinevere, and Arthur—love that undercuts oaths, secret meetings exposed by Agravaine, and the rescue that sunders the Round Table—was your sweet spot, Kushiel’s Dart gives you a similarly dangerous dance of love and loyalty. Phedre’s bond with her lord Joscelin and her queen tangles politics with passion, echoing how private desire in The Ill-Made Knight reshapes the fate of a realm.

If Lancelot’s journey gripped you for its grueling growth—his penance after the Grail quest, his faltering holiness beside Galahad’s perfection, and his struggle to be good despite repeated failures—Cazaril’s path will feel kindred. Broken by war and betrayal, he must navigate a princess’s peril and divine burdens, transforming himself through sacrifice much as Lancelot keeps striving to align his flawed heart with Arthur’s better world.

If the heart of The Ill-Made Knight for you was its searching ethics—Arthur’s experiment in might-for-right, the spiritual demands of the Grail, and Lancelot’s anguished theology of love and sin—then Till We Have Faces offers that same moral depth. Orual’s confession reframes a myth to ask whether love can be just, whether devotion can corrupt, and what it costs to see oneself truly—questions that haunt Lancelot from the tiltyard to Guinevere’s chamber.