Book description
One vital convoy can break Mussolini s stranglehold on Malta but it
is intercepted in the Mediterranean by enemy warships
Five light British cruisers are left to beat back the armed might of
the Italian battle fleet and C. S. Forester creator of Horatio
Hornblower takes us aboard HMS Artemis as she steams into battle
against overwhelming odds. We get inside the heads of Artemis s men,
from the Captain on his bridge down to the lowest engine room rating,
as they struggle over one long and terrifying afternoon to do their
duty.
C. S. Forester brilliantly recounts life aboard a British warship
during some of the darkest days of the Second World War: capturing the
urgency of the blazing guns, the thunderous rupturing of deck plates,
the screams of pain and the shouts of triumph.
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. His first success was Payment Deferred, a novel written at
the age of twenty-four and later dramatized and filmed with Charles
Laughton in the leading role. In 1932 Forester was offered a Hollywood
contract, and from then until 1939 he spent thirteen weeks of every year
in America. 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.
