Sharpe

About the Sharpe series

Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels follow Richard Sharpe, a foundling raised in a London workhouse who enlists as a private soldier and — against every rule of the Georgian army — is commissioned into the officer ranks after saving the Duke of Wellington's life in India. From the storming of Seringapatam to the retreat to Corunna, the breaches of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, the charge at Salamanca, and finally the field of Waterloo itself, Sharpe fights his way across two decades of the Napoleonic Wars with a stolen French cavalry sword, a Baker rifle, and a loyalty to his men that his aristocratic superiors rarely extend to him.

The appeal is Cornwell's trademark: meticulously researched battle sequences told from ground level, a working-class hero who never stops resenting the class system he has to fight inside, and a huge, familiar supporting cast — chiefly Sergeant Patrick Harper, his Irish best friend and the closest thing the series has to a second lead. Readers come for the sieges and set-piece battles and stay for Sharpe and Harper's friendship, which survives court-martials, betrayals, and thirty-odd years of campaigning.

Cornwell wrote the books wildly out of chronological order across four decades, so the series is really two overlapping timelines: the original Peninsular War novels he wrote first in the 1980s, and the India and early-career prequels he added from 1997 onward, plus three late additions (2021-2025) that finally close the gaps at the end of Sharpe's career. It's the defining series for readers who want Napoleonic-era military history rendered as pulse-quick adventure fiction, in the company of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels or George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman.