The Last Kingdom

About The Last Kingdom

The Last Kingdom (published in the UK as The Saxon Stories, then The Warrior Chronicles) is Bernard Cornwell's account of the making of England, narrated by Uhtred of Bebbanburg — a Northumbrian nobleman's son captured and raised by Vikings as a boy, who grows up caught between two loyalties: the Danes who taught him to fight and love, and the Saxon kingdoms of his birth. It opens in 866, as Danish armies are overrunning England one kingdom at a time, and follows the fifty-year fight to stop them, centred on Alfred the Great — pious, sickly, and the only English king with the will to hold the line.

Uhtred is the appeal: a pagan-hearted warrior forced to serve a devoutly Christian king he respects but never quite trusts, permanently torn between the Danish life he loves and the Saxon birthright — his ancestral fortress at Bebbanburg — he's determined to reclaim. Cornwell stages huge, visceral shield-wall battles (Cynuit, Ethandun, Brunanburh) with the same ground-level, unglamorous violence that defines his Sharpe novels, but the real engine of the series is Uhtred's oath-bound, reluctant service to a cause he didn't choose and a nation — 'England' — that doesn't exist yet.

Across thirteen novels the story runs from Alfred's darkest year through the reigns of his children and grandchildren, ending only when a united England is finally, violently, born. It's the natural next series for Sharpe readers who want the same battle-hardened, morally compromised hero and the same unsentimental history, transplanted three and a half centuries backward into the birth of a nation. The BBC/Netflix television adaptation (2015-2022) shares the title The Last Kingdom and follows the same overall arc, with the usual compressions and changes of a TV adaptation.

How to read this series

Straightforward: read the thirteen novels in publication order, which is also the story's chronological order — Cornwell wrote this series start to finish rather than jumping around the timeline the way he did with Sharpe. Begin with The Last Kingdom (2004) and read straight through to War Lord (2020), which Cornwell has confirmed closes out Uhtred's story.

There are no companion novellas, prequels, or optional side reads to worry about — this is a single, continuous thirteen-book arc. If you've watched the Netflix/BBC adaptation first, the novels track the same broad events (especially in the early seasons) but diverge more as the show progresses and eventually ends its own story earlier than the books do, so there's no spoiler-free way to skip ahead — just start at book one.