Mr. Cornwell,

 

I wanted to take a moment and thank you for your incredible talent that you’ve shared with the world.

 

I was finishing another of yours tonight–“The Pale Horseman,” and that familiar rush of despair at reaching the end of your novels, braided with the hope of the sequel, fell upon me.

 

You don’t know me, and we’ll almost certainly never cross paths, but I realized recently that your stories have defined a large portion of my young life.  When my parents split, Sharpe’s Rifles was a wonderful, adventurous escape.  I read Sharpe’s Tiger by chem-light glow after late combat patrols in Afghanistan.  When my son was born, he insisted on being held to go to sleep, so I would sit with him asleep on my chest reading The Archer’s Tale into the deepest corners of the night.

 

I left the enlisted business, and I am currently a literature major at the University of Montana, preparing for commissioning into the U.S. Army (there’s a combination!)  and (inept as I am to properly describe it) in my limited combat experience before college, I feel that your novels alone capture the complexity, chaos, violence, terror, and wonder of warfare.  Your ability to weave the thread of humanity into the senseless mist of warfare is something  very stirring to me, and  your narrations have been a constant friend in my life. I deeply appreciate how clearly you convey that there should only be one agenda: that of telling the story.  You make everyone want to be a novelist.

 

I wish you all the happiness in the world, and I am eagerly anticipating my return home from the library tomorrow with a copy of The Lords of the North.

 

Very Respectfully,

 

Andrew Visscher

Missoula, Montana, USA