Sharpe's Fury
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Review
Praise for Bernard Cornwell and the Sharpe series 'Cornwell describes military action brilliantly. He evokes all the sights and sounds and smells while managing to describe the fluctuations of the battle with enough vim to keep you in suspense!The Sharpe novels are wonderfully urgent and alive.' Daily Telegraph 'Cornwell has maintained a marvellously high standard throughout the series!brilliantly lucid and compellingly exciting.' Evening Standard
Product Description
The long-awaited twenty-first novel in the number one bestselling series featuring Richard Sharpe. In the winter of 1811 the war seemed lost. All Spain has fallen to the French, except for Cadiz which is now the Spanish capital and is under siege. Wellington and his British army are in Portugal, waiting for spring to spark the war to life again. Richard Sharpe and his company are part of a small expeditionary force sent to break a bridge across the River Guadiana. What begins as a brilliant piece of soldiering turns into disaster, thanks to the brutal savagery of the French Colonel Vandal who is leading his battalion to join the siege of Cadiz. Sharpe extricates a handful of men from the debacle and is driven south into the threatened city. There, in Cadiz, he discovers more than one enemy. Many Spaniards doubt Britain's motives and believe their future would be brighter if they made peace with the French, and one of them, a baleful priest, secures a powerful weapon to break the British alliance. He will use a beautiful whore and the letters she received from a wealthy man. The priest will use blackmail, and Sharpe must defeat him in a sinister war of knife and treachery in the dark alleys of the city. Yet the alliance will only survive if the French siege can be lifted. An allied army marches from the city to take on the more powerful French and, once again, a brilliant piece of soldiering turns to disaster, this time because the Spanish refuse to fight. A small British force is trapped by a French army, and the only hope now lies with the outnumbered redcoats who, on a hill beside the sea, refuse to admit defeat. And there, in the sweltering horror of Barossa, Sharpe finds Colonel Vandal again. Sharpe's Fury is based on the real events of the winter of 1811 that led to the extraordinary victory of Barossa, the battle which saw the British capture the first French eagle of the Napoleonic Wars
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sharpe sneaks into another battle,
By
This review is from: Sharpe's Fury (Paperback)
This book slots in between Sharpe's Escape and Sharpe's Battle and describes the build-up to the Battle of Barossa. As usual the battle sequences are brilliantly told, and Sharpe and his elite Riflemen find themselves in the thick of the action. The middle section of the book is set in Cadiz, the last outpost of Spain, besieged by the French and unwillingly playing host to the British. Sharpe has to help extricate a British diplomat from a potentially diastrous scandal, which he naturally achieves in his own inimitable style. The diplomat is Wellington's younger brother and there is an excellent scene where he eloquently defends Sharpe against the accusations of a very pompous senior officer. He refers to Sharpe's action at Assaye, where he saved Arthur Wellesley's life, and later discusses his brother's character with Sharpe in a very friendly interview which immediately endears this character to the reader as well as to Sharpe, despite his indiscreet behaviour. As usual, Sharpe has a personal mission as well as one for the army, this time hunting the man who took his lieutenant prisoner in the action at the start of the novel.
This is another great addition to the Sharpe collection, which I really enjoyed reading, though I think Cornwell may now have run out of potential fill-in novels, as he seems to have covered all the major battles. Unless he writes about Rolica and Vimeiro - I think they are the only Peninsular battles left!
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but not entirely convincing,
By
This review is from: Sharpe's Fury (Hardcover)
This book reads like two stories glued together. The first half tells the tale of how Sharpe comes to be in the service of the brother of the Duke of Wellington, who is the British ambassador in Cadiz. Wellesley Junior needs to obtain some ill-judged love-letters that he has written to a very unsuitable woman. Sharpe and his men, who have arrived in Cadiz after a bruising mission to blow up a bridge, are enlisted to aid Wellesley buy back his letters. This story, of intrigue and murder amidst the old town of Cadiz, is very well told and excitingly paced. The opening bridge-blowing adventure is also highly entertaining. As with so many other Sharpe novels, the reader is left wondering whether British officers of the day really were that stupid and pig-headed.
However, the second story of the Battle of Barossa seems like it belongs in a different novel. Even Sharpe and his men realise that as they say on several occasions "we shouldn't be here". The plotting that gets Sharpe & co onto the battlefield is very contrived (Sharpe is brave and an outstanding soldier but usually does not willingly put himself in such danger if there is no good reason to do so) and most of the action concerns a new set of characters who have only had walk-on parts (at most) in the first half of the novel. This is not to say that the account of the Battle of Barossa is anything other than exceptionally well told, but it just belongs somewhere else. Cornwell does at least bring to life the British senior officers whose fortunes we follow (until Sharpe turns up) and his description of battle is, as always, outstanding. Perhaps the author is seeking to contrast the earlier incompetences of Sharpe's initial mission with the stout-hearted professionalism shown in this battle. There is a "baddie" from that earlier mission who Sharpe wants to polish off, but why wander around in a bloody, corps-level battle to look for a needle in a hay-stack? So while the book is an exciting read and is full of Cornwell's usual flair for the feel of this period, the need to have Sharpe appear in every major battle of the Peninsular War is becoming a little tiresome and, in this case, unconvincing.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A true return to form!,
By
This review is from: Sharpe's Fury (Paperback)
After reading Sharpe's Escape I was left with the strong impression that Cornwell had run out of battles to write about, but Fury proved me ecstatically wrong. For the most part the novel is in the same vein as Escape, Sharpe and his 5 riflemen out on their own fighting their own war. Entertaining but not why I got into Sharpe. The battle at the end though is a perfect example of Cornwell's finest talent, writing sprawling battles with a cast of thousands. I can now once again look forward to the next installment of Sharpe, in the hopes that he will march again. To war.
PS is it me or does nearly every chapter end with "And (noun) will/must (verb)"?!
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