george macdonald fraser flashman books in order

But Tranter also wrote several books o international geopolitical espionage and competition. He specialised in deeply researched historical novels of Scottish history. Nigel Tranter is a Scottish writer, from Glasgow, who was once a regular fixture on the bestseller lists too. In the very first Flashman book, simply titled Flashman (1969) everyone’s favourite coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, is a reluctant secret agent in Afghanistan alongside Lord Cardigan’s Hussars the disastrous Retreat from Kabul in 1842. Hollywood made a film of it in 1978 with Anthony Quinn.Īnd excuse too to work in a little Flashman, courtesy of George Macdonald Fraser’s legendary character, an antihero Victorian soldier who undergoes numerous unabashedly imperial adventures, who should need no introduction. Mark Miller, stationed in Kabul at the American embassy, is tasked with finding a young American woman, Ellen Jasper, who has disappeared after her marriage to an Afghan national. And so we start with Caravans (1963), Michener’s great post-World War Two saga of Afghanistan. One of the great blockbuster authors of the post-war period-there was a time it was impossible to get on a plane and observe what your fellow passengers were reading or turn on a TV movie channel without Michener being somewhere close by. No wonder Kabul has long attracted crime, espionage and thriller writers.Īnd, at last, an excuse to add a James A Michener book to a CrimeReads Crime and the City. A geopolitical hot spot, a country of incomparable beauty and harshness combined, a culture at once intriguing and hard to know.

The Soviet invasion of 1979 started a series of continuous civil wars – Russian vs Mujahideen Taliban against the American-led invasion, a brief respite before Kabul fell to the Taliban once again in 2021. It was a place of colour, experimentation, modernism – once dubbed the “Paris of Central Asia”. But once Kabul was different – an oasis high up in a narrow valley of the Hindu Kush and the thrilling end of the old “Hippie Trail”. Kabul – of late a poor benighted city of three and half million people destroyed by politics, extremism, endemic poverty, and foreign intervention – British, Soviet, American.

George macdonald fraser flashman books in order