The Admiral

Naples and Sicily in 1798, the year Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Nile, told through a young Englishman in the admiral's household and the journal he keeps. Douglas Sladen worked from the published letters and dispatches and set the romance inside the documented record. Nelson, Emma Hamilton and the Neapolitan court appear as the papers show them, which is stranger than invention. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Turner and Aivazovsky follow the sea from calm to storm, matching the novel's course from Naples to the Nile.