Mr Midshipman Fury

Fans of Hornblower and Sharpe will love this captivating and compelling nautical adventure from much loved author G.S.Beard. Guaranteed to stir into life even the most sluggish of readers! 'If you like sea stories, you will enjoy this, and even if you think you don't but enjoy things like Sharpe, it might just convert you' - HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW 'Excellent gripping story gives you little time to put the book down' -- ***** Reader review 'Read almost overnight, difficult to put down, a memorable yarn' -- ***** Reader review 'A proper page turner' -- ***** Reader review 'A brilliant read, I was hooked from the beginning to the end' -- ***** Reader review 'I felt like I was on the high seas with them!' -- ***** Reader review ************************************************************* 1792: the start of the French Revolutionary Wars. A shadow hangs over John Thomas Fury in this his first voyage as a midshipman aboard the 32-gun frigate Amazon. The son of a violent and unstable brig commander who drove his crew to mutiny, Fury finds himself an outcast onboard and working doubly hard to prove that he isn't cursed like his father. Redemption arrives when Amazon reaches Bombay, only to discover that ships of the East India Company have disappeared, including the Company's warships. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean a very powerful privateer is at work and the Governor despatches Amazon to find and destroy her. Soon afterwards Amazon is in a desperate fight for her life against a much stronger foe. In such crucibles of fire are the officers in His Majesty's Service forged. Can Fury cover himself in glory and banish the shadows of the past are forever? Fury's adventures continue in Lieutenant Fury.

If you like Hornblower and Sharpe, you will love this all-action nautical page-turner from much loved author G.S.Beard. You'll feel as if you are in the midst of the action! 'If you like sea stories, you will enjoy this, and even if you think you don't but enjoy things like Sharpe, it might just convert you' - HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW 'Kept me spellbound' -- ***** Reader review 'A fun, fast read' -- ***** Reader review 'Excellent story and very exciting' -- ***** Reader review ************************************************************* 1793: the French Revolutionary Wars continue... When HMS Amazon is returning from an arduous duty in the Indian Ocean, she encounters a French frigate in the Atlantic which unexpectedly opens fire - a bloody sea battle ensues resulting in both triumph and personal tragedy for Acting Lieutenant John Fury. A battered Amazon puts into Gibraltar for repairs and newly promoted Fury finds he is to be transferred away from his home on the Amazon and set a new challenge: he will be the fifth lieutenant on the 74-gun-man of war Fortitude. The action never stops in Toulon, where Fury is posted and he eventually finds himself defending a prominent fort ashore as the Republican armies, inspired by a young artillery officer by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, establish a brutal siege of the port. It is soon clear that Britain and her allies are going to be hard pressed to hold onto their prize. But Fury has more to lose than most - in the maelstrom of the siege he has met and fallen in love with a pretty French girl, Sophie Gourrier. Somehow, as the defence crumbles, he must rescue his men and Sophie from the doomed city. John Fury's adventures started in Mr Midshipman Fury - have you read it?

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible doll maker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age. Outside his window, a long humid summer, the first hot season of the third millennium, baked and perspired. The city boiled with money. Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable. - from Fury From one of the world’s truly great writers comes a wickedly brilliant and pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since the Bombay of Midnight’s Children have a time and place been so intensely captured in a novel. Salman Rushdie’s eighth novel opens on a New York living at break-neck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives in this town of IPOs and white-hot trends looking, perversely, for escape. He is a man in flight from himself. This former philosophy professor is the inventor of a hugely popular doll whose multiform ubiquity – as puppet, cartoon and talk-show host – now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating, and Solanka very nearly commits an unforgivable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees across the Atlantic. He discovers a city roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective and a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats and bone-deep resentments. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. He becomes deeply embroiled in not one but two new liaisons, both, in very different ways, dangerous. Professor Solanka’s navigation of his new world makes for a hugely entertaining and compulsively readable novel. Fury is a pitiless comedy that lays bare, with spectacular insight and much glee, the darkest side of human nature.

The first Horatio Hornblower Tale of the Sea 1793, the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, and Midshipman Horatio Hornblower receives his first command . . . As a seventeen-year-old with a touch of sea sickness, young Horatio Hornblower hardly cuts a dash in His Majesty's navy. Yet from the moment he is ordered to board a French merchant ship in the Bay of Biscay and take command of crew and cargo, he proves his seafaring mettle on the waves. After a character-forming duel, several deadly chases and some dramatic captures and escapes, the young Hornblower is soon forged into a formidable man of the sea. This is the first of eleven books chronicling the nautical adventures of C. S. Forester's inimitable hero, Horatio Hornblower. Featuring an exclusive introduction by Bernard Cornwell, creator of Sharpe 'Absolutely compelling. One of the great masters of narrative' San Francisco Chronicle