Sharpe 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.

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’.

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.

This is another of my favourites, and it’s also another of the books where the action is entirely fictional. It describes a ‘commando’ raid on a French coastal fort. There were many such raids in the Napoleonic Wars, and somehow Sharpe missed out on them so I invented this attack on the fort in the Bay of Arcachon, an attack that goes disastrously wrong because of Pierre Ducos’s intervention. Sharpe finds himself stranded, surrounded and with only one very unlikely ally – Captain Cornelius Killick from Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Most of Sharpe’s books describe actions abroad (Britain’s military, very sensibly, doesn’t believe in playing home games), but in Sharpe’s Regiment our hero is sent home to raise soldiers for his regiment, the South Essex, and once in England he runs into an old enemy – Sir Henry Simmerson, once a Colonel of the South Essex and now, what else, a taxman.