Book description
The final Horatio Hornblower story tells of Napoleon's plans to
invade England...
Set in 1805, Hornblower and the Crisis finds Horatio Hornblower in
possession of confidential dispatches from Bonaparte after a vicious
hand-to-hand encounter with a French brig. The admiralty rewards
Hornblower by sending him on a dangerous espionage mission that will
light the powder trail leading to the battle of Trafalgar ...
Hornblower and the Crisis was unfinished at the time of
Forester's death, but the author left notes - included here - telling
us how the tale would end. Also included are two further stories -
Hornblower and the Widow McCool and The Last Encounter
- that tell of Hornblower as a very young and very old man,
respectively.
This is the final book chronicling the adventures of C. S.
Forester's inimitable nautical hero, Horatio Hornblower.
C. S Forester was born in Cairo in 1899, where his father was
stationed as a government official. He studied medicine at Guy's
Hospital, and after leaving Guy's without a degree he turned to writing
as a career. On the outbreak of war he entered the Ministry of
Information and later he sailed with the Royal Navy to collect material
for The Ship. He made a voyage to the Bering Sea to gather material for
a similar book on the United States Navy, and it was during this trip
that he was stricken with arteriosclerosis, a disease which left him
crippled. However, he continued to write and in the Hornblower novels
created the most renowned sailor in contemporary fiction. He died in
1966.
