Britannia's Gamble: The Dawlish Chronicles: March 1884 - February 1885 - Paperback

by Antoine Vanner (Author)

Britannia's Gamble is the ninth book in the Dawlish Chronicles series of historical naval adventure novels

It's 1884 A fanatical Islamist revolt is sweeping all before it in the vast wastes of the Sudan and establishing a rule of persecution and terror. Only the city of Khartoum holds out, its defence masterminded by a British national hero, General Charles Gordon. His position is weakening by the day and a relief force, crawling up the Nile from Egypt, may not reach him in time to avert disaster.
But there is one other way of reaching Gordon...

A boyhood memory leaves the ambitious Royal Navy officer Nicholas Dawlish no option but to attempt it.

The obstacles are daunting - barren mountains and parched deserts, tribal rivalries and merciless enemies - and this even before reaching the river that is key to the mission. Dawlish knows that every mile will be contested and that the siege at Khartoum is quickly moving towards its bloody climax.

Outnumbered and isolated, with only ingenuity, courage and fierce allies to sustain them, with safety in Egypt far beyond the Nile's raging cataracts, Dawlish and his mixed force face brutal conflict on land and water as the Sudan descends into ever-worsening savagery.

And for Dawlish himself, one unexpected and tragic event will change his life forever...

Britannia's Gamble is a desperate one. The stakes are high, the odds heavily loaded against success. Has Dawlish accepted a mission that can only end in failure - and worse?

This is the ninth volume of the Dawlish Chronicles series - action and adventure set in the age of transition from sail to steam in the last decades of the 19th Century. It can be enjoyed as part of the series or as a standalone story.

Britannia's Gamble is more than a naval thriller, or a tale of war and military conflict, for it continues the story of Nicholas Dawlish, a Royal Navy officer who is more familiar with steam, breech-loaders and torpedoes than with sails, carronades and broadsides. Other volumes in this naval fiction series chart Dawlish's rise in the Royal Navy. As a boy in the late 1850s he joined a service still commanded by veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. But now, in the early 1880s, sail is yielding to steam, new technologies are creating new weapons and established international power-balances are shifting. Against the background of real historical events Dawlish has to confront challenges inconceivable to earlier generations of officers.

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 by land and by sea. The Napoleonic era has however come to dominate the war and military fiction 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. I've reflected this in the Dawlish Chronicles and for this reason I'm pleased that nautical author Joan Druett has described me as 'The Tom Clancy of historical naval fiction.' My novels have as their settings actual events of the international power-games of the period and real-life personalities usually play significant roles. Britannia's Gamble - in which General Charles Gordon is a key figure - is no exception."

Author Biography

Antoine Vanner, who has himself led an adventurous life, found himself flattered when nautical novelist Joan Druett described him as the "The Tom Clancy of historic naval fiction".

He says: "I find the late Victorian era, roughly 1870 to 1900, fascinating because for my baby-boomer generation it's 'the day before yesterday'. It's history that you can almost touch. Our grandparents grew up in that period and you heard a lot from them about it. So much in that time was so similar to what we still have today that you feel you could live easily in it, and then you hit some aspects - especially those associated with social conventions and attitudes - that make it seem wholly alien. It was a time of change on every front - intellectual, scientific, medical, social, political and technological - and yet people seem to have accommodated to these rapid changes very well."

"A revolution occurred in naval technology," Vanner says. "The Royal Navy that went to war with Russia in 1854 was virtually unchanged from that of Nelson's time, but within five decades the World War 1 navy of dreadnoughts, battle-cruisers, submarines, wireless and the first aircraft carriers was in place and Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. And individual officers didn't just live through these changes - they conceived and managed them. Nicholas Dawlish, hero of my Dawlish Chronicles series, is just such an officer and he's determined to use the cutting-edge technology of his time to advance his career."

Vanner's books play out against a background of growing international tension. There was little open confrontation between the great powers - Britain, France and Russia, with Germany, Japan and the United States catching up - but their rivalries were often played out by proxies, just as the Communist and Western blocks did during the Cold War. And the challenges Dawlish encounters are in such ill-defined and un-admitted jostling for power.

To learn more about Nicholas Dawlish and his world, and to contact Antoine Vanner with your comments and queries, checkout www.dawlishchronicles.com