The Books

The story of the battle – and Sharpe’s part in it. For some reason this was published in the US as, simply, Waterloo. There’s almost no plot in this book because there doesn’t need to be (though Sharpe does have to settle accounts with the man who poached his second wife). The story of the battle is so dramatic, so unlikely and so full of suspense that fiction is scarcely needed. Nevertheless the book does suggest that perhaps it was not the enemy who shot the Prince of Orange. It also made a very good video.

An eccentric and reluctant aristocrat just wants to be left alone to be a sea-gypsy, but a theft from his ancestral home hauls him back to Britain and mayhem. For idiotic reasons this book was retitled in the United States as Killer’s Wake.

This takes place between the end of the Peninsular War and the Waterloo Campaign – and Sharpe pursues Ducos to Italy, though not before he’s fought in the climactic battle at Toulouse which is Wellington’s last victory in the Peninsular War. Napoleon is exiled to Elba and, in the chaos of the first days of peace, the Emperor’s personal treasury gets ‘lost’.

In which a crippled veteran of the Falkland’s War sails into the north Atlantic to discover whether a famous television presenter is a murderer.

The beginning of the Peninsular War (the battles between 1808 and 1814 to expel the French from Portugal and Spain). The Peninsular Campaign occupies most of the Sharpe series and this book begins during the infamous retreat to Corunna, but ends in a purely fictional battle.