Flashman on the March
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4.1 • 19 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
It’s 1868 and Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., arch-cad, amorist, cold-headed soldier, and reluctant hero, is back! Fleeing a chain of vengeful pursuers that includes Mexican bandits, the French Foreign Legion, and the relatives of an infatuated Austrian beauty, Flashy is desperate for somewhere to take cover. So desperate, in fact, that he embarks on a perilous secret intelligence-gathering mission to help free a group of Britons being held captive by a tyrannical Abyssinian king. Along the way, of course, are nightmare castles, brigands, massacres, rebellions, orgies, and the loveliest and most lethal women in Africa, all of which will test the limits of the great bounder’s talents for knavery, amorous intrigue, and survival.
Flashman on the March—the twelfth book in George MacDonald Fraser’s ever-beloved, always scandalous Flashman Papers series--is Flashman and Fraser at their best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Last seen in Flashman and the Tiger (2000), that incomparable English rogue, Sir Harry Flashman, is up to his usual amatory and military hijinks in the 12th installment of Fraser's masterful Flashman papers. Having seduced a silly Austrian princess on the ship bearing the body of Maximilian, the ill-fated emperor of Mexico, back home to Trieste in 1867, Harry eludes the offended Austrian authorities by seizing the chance to become the British envoy on a mission to rescue a group of European hostages held by the mad Abyssinian king, Theodore. (When Whitehall neglected to respond to the polite letter Theodore wrote Queen Victoria, he took captive a few hundred unfortunate foreigners.) This now obscure expedition, which made headlines in its day, provides the kind of sardonic history lesson fans have come to relish. Allusions to adventures not yet published tantalize, notably those to do with Flashman's role in the U.S. Civil War. Fraser has nibbled at the edges (Flashy was there for John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1995's Flashman and the Angel of the Lord), and one can only hope that the next volume does more than simply mention such iconic names as Gettysburg.
Customer Reviews
The last of the Flashman papers, as good as the first
The Flashman papers are simply the best historical fiction every written (yes, even better than O'brian or Michner). You will never have more fun while learning. If the is any flaw to any of the Flashman papers, is that they are so good you forget that it is fiction. Everything I ever learned about human nature i learned from Flashman's brutal and unbiased observation of his fellow man (and woman... and a lot of those). Flashman on the March is the last of the series, and while the two novels that proceed it are the weakest of the series, On the March recaptures the Flashman magic and is equal to the best off the papers. A long forgotten British campaign in is brought back to the modern reader in a take that makes it relevant today.