Book excerpt: The author of the million-copy best-seller Ageless Body, Timeless Mind emerges as a powerful new force in fiction with a luminously written novel about the final act of the Arthurian legend playing out in modern England. The Return of Merlin is a brilliantly realized narrative that begins in Arthurian times and jumps boldly to our own 20th-century dark age of war, pollution, predation, and hatred--with a message of hope.