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The Wolves of the Radfan
War is not a pleasant business. People die, cut to ribbons by bullets, limbs blown off by mines and roadside bombs. Not just the soldiers, but the non-combatants: young women, the elderly and children. 1963 to 1967 saw Britain fighting in a hostile and arid country, trying to stem the expansion of communism in the Middle East. On the ground, the ordinary soldiers, infantry, gunners, engineers and armoured regiments did what the British soldier always does – getting on with the job come hell or high water! Bomber’s story is written from real-life experience. Although Bomber, the main character, is fictitious, he is based on a combination of many soldiers. Many of the events took place as described but with the storyteller’s licence when melting them together. The Wolves of the Radfan, the largest tribe that straddled the then-border between North and South Yemen, started the war and the British soldiers put paid to the Wolves in 1964, but then came the push by the communists from North Yemen and it was then the contest started in all the brutality that war produces. Many acts of great courage have not been mentioned in the book, especially in the period from 1963 to the end of 1964, perhaps someone else will write about that. Fact and fiction, fiction or fact? This is a story of a normal British infantryman who faced combat and it was nothing like he had ever imagined.
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Breaking the Flood
In Breaking the Flood, the first of four novels about the fall of Constantinople, Niccolo Gritti, a nineteen year-old scion of an aristocratic merchant dynasty in mid-15th century Venice, recounts his upbringing, his family’s impoverishment and his decision to take ship in a trading fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. Ambushed by corsairs, Niccolo is pressed as a galley slave. Soon, a fellow oarsman identifies himself as Demetrius Angelos, member of a distinguished military family in Constantinople. Demetrius is desperate to return there, threatened as his city is by the bellicose ruler of the Ottomans, Mehmet II. Eventually, the two young men escape the corsairs’ clutches and Niccolo decides to throw in his lot with Demetrius, journeying with him to the decayed Byzantine capital. At once, Bildungsroman and quest narrative, Breaking the Flood is both vivid and haunting, recreating a forgotten world with cinematic and at times hallucinatory clarity.
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Napoleon: Uprising
Amidst the turmoil of chaos and revolution, a young Napoleon Bonaparte leaves the safety of his Corsican homeland to be thrust into the corruption of the French aristocracy as he pursues a career in the artillery. Facing riot and rebellion throughout France, Napoleon must fight to protect a society that sees him as an outsider. As the world threatens to crumble around him, Napoleon must prove himself in order to protect his family from those who would destroy all he loves. This outsider, shunned and despised, may well prove to be France’s only hope.
£14.99
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