In the original dustsheet. Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

A rare and excellent copy of one of Wilbur’s best tales.

Wilbur Smith is for me a guilty pleasure. The books I have read by him range from exciting action packed thrillers to occasionally cliche ridden stories of cringe worthy sex and violence. But I still return to them, they are after all pure escapism, and I hold my hand up, I enjoy them.

Birds of Prey was a pleasant surprise. The last couple of Courtney novels prior to this I have to admit weren’t the best but with this book it’s a return to form for Mr Smith. It is a prequel to the Courtney saga and follows the fortunes of Hal Courtney and is set in the 1660’s. It’s a story of high adventure on the seas, with pirates, sea battles, hidden treasures, slavery and dastardly villains. Yes the heroes and villains are cliched and the women beautiful and seductive but hey, it’s all good fun. It’s fast paced and exciting and what it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for with sheer entertainment.

Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Northern Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specializing in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.

An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel When the Lion Feeds. This encouraged him to become a full-time writer, and he developed three long chronicles of the South African experience which all became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick’s advice to “write about what you know best”, and his work takes in much authentic detail of the local hunting and mining way of life, along with the romance and conflict that goes with it. By the time of his death in 2021 he had published 49 books of which he sold over 140 million copies, 24 million of them in Italy (by 2014).