Britannia's Reach

"Antoine Vanner is the Tom Clancy of historical naval fiction" - Author and Nautical Historian Joan Druett. Britannia's Reach is the 5th novel in the Dawlish Chronicles series. It continues the story of the ambitious Royal Navy officer Nicholas Dawlish, last seen in Britannia's Wolf. It's November 1879 and on a broad river deep in the heart of South America, a flotilla of paddle steamers thrashes slowly upstream. It is laden with troops, horses and artillery, and intent on conquest and revenge. Ahead lies a commercial empire that was wrested from a British consortium in a bloody revolution. Now the investors are determined to recoup their losses and are funding a vicious war to do so. Nicholas Dawlish, on leave from the Royal Navy, is playing a leading role in the expedition. But as brutal land and river battles mark its progress upriver, and as both sides inflict and endure ever greater suffering, stalemate threatens. And Dawlish finds himself forced to make a terrible ethical choice if he is to return to Britain with some shreds of integrity remaining... Why this series? "I've enjoyed sea adventures since I was introduced to C.S. Forester's Hornblower books when I was a boy," says author Antoine Vanner, "and I've never tired since of stories of action and adventure. The Napoleonic era has however come to dominate the war and military genre but the century that followed it was one no less exciting, an added attraction being the arrival and adoption of so much new technology from the 1860s onward. My novels have as their backgrounds actual events of the international power-games of the period and Britannia's Reach is no exception."