Flying Colours: 08 (Hornblower Saga) - Softcover

This seventh volume in the Hornblower series opens with Captain Horatio Hornblower a prisoner in the French fortress of Rosas, having had to surrender his ship, the "Sutherland," after a long and bloody battle. Within days he and his first lieutenant, Bush, who was crippled in the last fight, will be taken to Paris to be tried on trumped-up charges of violating the laws of war, and most probably executed as an attempt by Napoleon to rally the war-weary empire behind him. Even if Hornblower escapes this fate, and somehow finds his way back to England, he will have to face courtmarial there for his surrender of a British ship. Only the inimitable Hornblower could possibly overcome this latest set of challenges. Fears for his life and his reputation compete in Hornblower's mind with worries about his pregnant wife and his possibly widowed lover, as he impatiently awaits his chance to make a move....

Cecil Scott "C.S." Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 - 2 April 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 12-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and "The African Queen" (1935; filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels "A Ship of the Line" and "Flying Colours" were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.