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

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At the close of Wilbur Smith’s best selling MONSOON, Tom Courtney and his brother Dorian battled on the high seas and finally reached the Cape of Good Hope to start life afresh. In this spellbinding new novel, the next generation of Courtneys are out to stake their claim in Southern Africa, travelling along the infamous ‘Robber’s Road’. It is a journey both exciting and hazardous, that takes them through the untouched wilderness of a beautiful land filled with warring tribes and wild animals. At heart a story of love and hatred, vengeance and greed, BLUE HORIZON is an utterly compelling adventure from one of the world’s most celebrated novelists.

Review: Whether taken independently in its own right, or read as another in the sequence of ‘Courtney’ novels, ‘Blue Horizon’ is a magnificent read. Hal Courtney is now a mature man, comfortably ensconced at High Weald, the family seat in Dorset. He now has three sons, William, Tom and Dorian, who reside at their home. Then Hal is asked by the East India Company to return to the Ocean of the Indies in pursuit of an arab pirate, Al Auf, the Bad One, who is very much on the ascendant, to the detriment of Comnpany interests. Leaving William, his eldest and heir to the estate, to run the business, Hal takes the young boys, Tom and Dorian, as well as the faithful Aboli and gathers his old muckers from their various domiciles in Dorset and London, and sets out via the Cape of Good Hope, to hunt down the pirate. The adventure is a fabulous narrative of life on the tall ships, depicted with wonderful authenticity by Smith, of savagery and warfare at sea, and of the almost tragic abduction of ten year-old Dorian by the pirates. There would be little point in tracing here the strands of the narrative as they take the reader through the ensuing eventful decade in the lives of the young Courtneys. I did feel, however, that the end comes too abruptly and leaves several strands unaccounted for. What for example is the fate of the dreadful Zayn El Din, who was Dorian’s deadliest rival in his years among the Arabs? What became of High Weald in the years the boys were absent after the demise of both Hal and William? Does ownership of the estate fall to Dorian? Does he simply abandon it in favour of life with his brother Tom in the New World? This criticism notwithstanding, ‘Blue Horizon’ makes splendid reading, romantic, exciting, thrilling and compelling. I recommend it unreservedly.

Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University. After the successful publication of WHEN THE LION FEEDS in 1964 he became a full-time writer, and has since written 30 novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books have been translated into twenty-six different languages.

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).