Mary Stewart (1916–2014) made a promise in her youth to devote her life to literature. And fortune was on her side. The first novel (“Madam, will you speak?”) pleased readers, and almost every new work by the English writer became a bestseller. But real success came to her in the 1970s, when the trilogy about the wizard Merlin and King Arthur (The Crystal Grotto, Hollow Hills, The Last Magic) was released, combining history and fantasy and subsequently developing into a pentalogy (the novels “The Bad Day” and “The Prince and the Pilgrim” were added). The writer herself defines her task simply: “If the voice of legend is so persistent, if the motives are so tenacious and revived again and again, then they contain a real grain, even in the most fantastic stories that have been layered around the core of the meager facts of Arthur’s existence. It’s a fascinating activity to make sense of these sometimes wild and illogical plots, to give them the character of more or less coherent and plausible stories about human actions and the world of imagination.” The book includes the first two novels of the series.