A major new Bloomsbury series in the vein of Flashman and set in World War II.
This is the first in a series about reluctant hero Dick Coward, an ordinary chap who keeps finding himself in extraordinary circumstances. World War II's answer to Flashman - only much more honourable - he finds himself caught up in all the war's major events. In the Battle of Britain, he flies Spitfires - having earlier crash landed at Dunkirk, of course - before being booted out of the RAF in time to see action in the Western Desert, be captured at Crete and be posted as a military advisor at Stalingrad (where he ends up fighting for his life on both sides), from whence to D-Day, Arnheim, the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine.
Keeping him alive through all this is Coward's Jeeves-like, cynical, hard bitten batman (and head groom to his estate) Price, for whom noblesse oblige died long ago at Passchendaele.
Coward's goal: to amass sufficient military glory to appease his difficult father. Otherwise the family estate will end up in the hands of his ghastly, undeserving brother, James.
