Sharpe Books

Sharpe’s Havoc is set during the French invasion of Portugal in 1809 and Sir Arthur Wellesley’s devastating counter-attack. Patrick Harper is back, as is Captain Hogan. The book slots between Sharpe’s Rifles and Sharpe’s Eagle.

Sharpe’s Christmas contains two short stories, ‘Sharpe’s Christmas’ and ‘Sharpe’s Ransom’. ‘Sharpe’s Christmas’ is set in 1813, towards the end of the Peninsular War and falls after Sharpe’s Regiment. ‘Sharpe’s Ransom’ comes after Sharpe’s Waterloo and is set in peacetime.

It is the summer of 1812 and Richard Sharpe, newly recovered from the wound he received in the fighting at Salamanca, is given an easy duty; to guard a Commissary Officer posted to an obscure Spanish fort where there are some captured French muskets to repair. But unknown to the British, the French are planning a raid and Sharpe is in for a fight!

This tells the tale of one of the most obscure campaigns of the whole of the Napoleonic wars. The Danes had a huge merchant fleet, second only in size to Great Britain’s, and to protect it they possessed a formidable navy. But Denmark was a very small country and when, in 1807, the French decide they will invade Denmark and take the fleet for themselves, Britain has to act swiftly. Swiftly, but not particularly justly. Sharpe is inside Copenhagen when the dreadful and fateful bombardment begins.

Sharpe has to go home from India, and he would have left in 1805 and Cape Trafalgar lies on his way home, so why should he not be there at the right time? The greatest difficulty in writing this book was engineering the plot so that Sharpe could be on board a fighting ship of the Royal Navy (he would have sailed home in an East Indiaman, a merchant ship), but once that was solved Sharpe could give a capable hand in this, the greatest of all sea battles fought under sail.