Thursday, April 01, 2010

Sharpe's Tiger

The name of the first historical novel in Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series. The epoch is the same as that in the C.S. Forrester Hornblower novels and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. Masterpiece Theater has brought filmed adaptations of Richard Sharpe stories to public television, and last Sunday night we watched a re-run of one of them. This provoked me to the downtown library, and I discovered an entire bookshelf of Cornwell's books.

The particular settings are actual British battles and the events surrounding them. In my edition of Sharpe's Tiger, the author writes a "Historical Note," where he describes how his narrative differs or is similar to what historians record. He also commends two histories of Wellington, who appears as a young colonel in this book: Longford's Wellington, the Years of the Sword, and Weller's Wellington in India.

Sharpe's Tiger whetted my appetite, and I'm going back for more.

2 comments:

Macon said...

Kells and I read this entire series. We loved it!

Paul Stokes said...

I thought about you and Kellsey as I wrote this post, and there you are: you've read the whole series. I thought that Sean Bean was perfect for the part of Sharpe in the Masterpiece Theater adaptations.