Mr Midshipman Hornblower

Description

'Hornblower is Hamlet in command of a battleship' New York Times 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. With a character-forming duel, several chases and some strange tavern encounters, 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.

C. S. Forester was born in Cairo in 1899, where his father was stationed as a government official. On the outbreak of war he entered the Ministry of Information and later he sailed with the Royal Navy. In the HORNBLOWER novels created the most renowned sailor in contemporary fiction. He died in 1966.

I recommend Forester to every literate I know -- Ernest Hemingway I find Hornblower admirable, vastly entertaining -- Sir Winston Churchill One of the best. Everyone interested in war, or in human nature, should read * Times Literary Supplement * Absolutely compelling. One of the great masters of narrative * San Francisco Chronicle * A master of the genre * New York Times *