Agincourt

Bernard Cornwell takes on one of the most storied clashes in English history in this novel about the battle of Agincourt. Shakespeare later dramatized the fight in his play Henry V, and Cornwell uses it as the backdrop for a story of soldiers and their loyalties during the English army's campaign in France.

At the center of the novel is Nicholas Hook, an archer serving in the king's host. Following him, the reader moves through the march and the lead-up to the fighting, and sees the pressures of war and the choices it forces on ordinary men.

Courage, love, devotion and duty run through the book. Cornwell, who also wrote the Richard Sharpe novels and the Saxon Tales, has built much of his work around war and the people who fight it.