Category: Historical Fiction

It is a perfect plot for Napoleon: stop Wellington’s forces in Spain and destroy Major Richard Sharpe.Major Richard Sharpe awaits the opening shots of the army’s new campaign with grim expectancy. Victory depends on the increasingly fragile alliance between Britain and Spain—an alliance that must be maintained at any cost. Unfortunately, things are about to get complicated for the Sharpe.An unfinished duel, a midnight murder, and the treachery of a beautiful prostitute lead to the imprisonment of Sharpe. The pawn in a plot conceived by his archenemy, Pierre Ducos, Sharpe is condemned to die as an assassin. Caught in a web of political intrigue for which his military experience has left him fatally unprepared, Sharpe becomes a fugitive—a man hunted by both ally and enemy alike.

( Courtesy of Kobo pbk 320 pages )

Only one man stands between Napoleon’s army and a British defeat—Major Richard Sharpe. A band of renegades led by Sharpe’s vicious mortal enemy, Obadiah Hakeswill, holds a group of British and French women hostage in a strategic mountain pass. Newly promoted, Major Sharpe is given the task of rescuing them. On the other side of the pass, Napoleon’s Grande Armée seeks to smash through and crush the British army in Portugal. Sharpe has only the support of his own company and the new Rocket Troop—the last word in military incompetence—but he cannot afford to contemplate defeat. To surrender or fail would mean the end of the war for the Allied armies. Outnumbered and attacked from two sides, Sharpe must hold his ground or die in the attempt.

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Sharpe’s Sword is a historical novel by Bernard Cornwell and covers the summer campaign of 1812, and the Battle of Salamanca on July 22 1812. Sharpe and his friend Sergeant Harper find themselves in a secret war of spies, while hunting down the sadistic and highly dangerous Colonel Philippe Leroux.

( Courtesy Of Biblio.com pbk 319 pages )

In many respects The Eye in the Door is a sequel to Pat Barker’s 1992 novel Regeneration. Barker found the sources for both novels in accounts of the lives of two historical figures—the famous antiwar poet Siegfried Sassoon and William Rivers, a neurologist who treated soldiers who had returned from the front in World War I. The real Rivers actually worked at Craiglockhart, a hospital in Scotland, and he did treat Sassoon there in 1917 and in London in 1918. Barker’s imagination transforms these historical sources and creates complex literary characters who interact with one another and with a variety of wholly imagined characters. One of the imagined characters in Regeneration was Billy Prior, who suffered from shell shock, now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. He was discharged from the hospital and assigned to permanent home service. Sassoon was discharged to active duty in November, 1917. The Eye in the Door continues Barker’s exploration of their lives and adds Charles Manning, an officer wounded in France and now suffering panic attacks. Prior is Rivers’ patient in his London clinic, and Sassoon appears late in the novel when he is sent to an American Red Cross hospital in London after suffering a minor head wound at the front. Rivers is called in by Sassoon’s attending physician because of recurring symptoms of emotional distress.

In Regeneration her focus was on the psychological impact of war on the combatants. The horrors of post-traumatic stress disorder are made vivid by the soldiers’ nightmares and flashbacks. In The Eye in the DoorBarker broadens her approach to include an indictment of repression and paranoia on the home front. The issues she raises reflect the contradictions and incongruities that are the basis of people’s lives in a country at war.

Billy Prior’s psychological crisis dominates The Eye in the Door. After successful treatment at Craiglockhart, Prior is discharged and sent to London to work in an intelligence unit in the Ministry of Munitions. There he investigates the activities of notorious pacifists. The woman he is sent to interview in a prison outside London is Beattie Roper, an elderly woman with whom he lived for a year when he was a small child. Her daughter, Hettie, was one of his closest friends. Prior’s return to his roots forces him to address the question of his allegiance—to the people he grew up with and to his country.

When Prior interviews Beattie, he begins to suspect that she was framed. He knows that she is a pacifist who hides deserters and helps provide them safe passage to Ireland. She is in prison, however, because she has been implicated in a plot to assassinate the prime minister. Actually, she had no part in such a plot: An informant, Lionel Spragge, hired by the Ministry of Munitions, altered the facts to implicate her. Why this need to imprison an old woman for life? Prior suspects that the Ministry of War has made Beattie a scapegoat. She will be a lesson to others. Clearly, Beattie is not under the control of German spies or other agents of a secret British organization. Her allegiance is to her children and to the young men she believes should not be sent to die in the trenches of France. In a time of war, however, governments will not tolerate any actions that may be construed as attacks upon the established order. Everyone must be on the same side; thus Beattie is sacrificed to “the cause.”

Another instance of the government’s repression is its treatment of homosexuals during the war. Certain people within the War Ministry believed that gays and lesbians were part of an intricate German plot to undermine the foundations of British culture and the British government. One of the people most afraid of exposure is Charles Manning. He returned from the front with a severely damaged knee and knows that he will never be sent back to the trenches. Still, he has repeated flashbacks of horrific scenes, and he suffers from panic attacks. Manning is happily married, and he loves his children, but he also has a secret life as a gay man. He has come to accept that part of his identity, but he is vulnerable because his homosexuality defines him as a pervert and as a criminal. He is terrified that someone will turn him in.

The fears that are provoked when paranoia and repression hold sway are evoked by the guiding metaphor of the novel, the eye in the door….

“The Eye in the Door – Summary” Literary Masterpieces, Critical Compilation Ed. Frank Northen Magill. eNotes.com, Inc. 1991 eNotes.com 23 May, 2018 <http://www.enotes.com/topics/eye-door#summary-summary>

1666: The Great Fire of London sweeps through the streets and a heavily pregnant woman flees the flames. A few months later she gives birth to a child disfigured by a red birthmark.

1718: Sixteen-year-old Eliza Tally sees the gleaming dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rising above a rebuilt city. She arrives as an apothecary’s maid, a position hastily arranged to shield the father of her unborn child from scandal. But why is the apothecary so eager to welcome her when he already has a maid, a half-wit named Mary? Why is Eliza never allowed to look her veiled master in the face or go into the study where he pursues his experiments? It is only on her visits to the Huguenot bookseller who supplies her master’s scientific tomes that she realizes the nature of his obsession. And she knows she has to act to save not just the child but Mary and herself.

With exquisite prose, dark humor, and a historian’s eye for detail, Clare Clark has created another transporting novel.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   382 pages )

A powerful novel of the North Atlantic in World War II, this is the story of the British ships Compass Rose and Saltash and of their desparate cat-and-mouse game with Nazi U-boats. First published to great accalim in 1951, The Cruel Sea remains a classic novel of endurance and daring.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   hardcover 426 pages )