Paperback. Gilt title on red cover.

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Follow up to BIRDS OF PREY and continue the saga of the Courteney family. Set at the start of the 18th century in England, East Africa and Arabia. Following the lives of the three sons of Hal Courteney, who are drawn inexorably to Africa. The adventure and excitement take place on the ocean but gradually the brothers are seduced by Africa.

Review: Whether taken independently as a novel in its own right, or read as another in Wilbur Smith’s sequence of ‘Courtney’ novels, ‘Monsoon’ is a magnificent read. The young Hal Courtney whom we left in ‘Birds of Prey’is now mature and thrice widowed and comfortably ensconced at the family seat, High Weald, in Dorset with his three sons, William, Tom and Dorian. When Hal is asked by the East India Company to take once more to the ocean wave in pursuit of an arab pirate, Al Auf, ‘the Bad One’, who is laying waste the shipping in the Ocean of the Indies to the detriment of Company interests, he has to act fast. He leaves William, his son and heir, to take charge of the family estate and business and decides that his young boys, Tom and Dorian, must accompany him, along with his old retainer Aboli. Hal’s old muckers from their various domiciles in Dorset and London are brought together and they set out via the Cape of Good Hope to hunt down the pirate.

The sequence of the ‘Courtney’ series is as follows:

• The Lion Feeds
• Sound of Thunder
• A Sparrow Falls
• Birds of Prey
• Monsoon
• Blue Horizon
• The Triumph of the Sun

The adventure of ‘Monsoon’ is a stunning narrative of life on the tall ships, depicted with remarkable authenticity by Wilbur Smith, to whom all credit must go for the depth and detail of his research, of warfare and savagery on the high sea and the heart-rending abduction by the pirates during a decisive sea battle of the ten year-old Dorian. 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. The ‘Monsoon’ of the title, however, is a direct reference to the destiny of Dorian, held first in captivity and then rising to the highest echelons of the social and military hierarchy of the Omani empire. In many respects, his extraordinary interlude in the Muslim lands and the changes that this experience brings to bear on his character and personality as he reaches manhood, make ‘Monsoon’ essentially Dorian’s story. I did feel that, as long as the novel is, the end is too sudden and too abruptly upon us and several fundamental questions remain unanswered. What is the fate of Zayn El Din, Dorian’s deadliest rival who spares his effort to take his life and very nearly succeeds? What becomes of High Weald after the demise of both Hal and William, during the years that the younger boys are absent? Does its ownership fall to Dorian and, in light of their God-sent reunion, does he simply abandon it in order to pursue his life with Tom in the New World? This criticism notwithstanding, ‘Monsoon’ makes splendid reading, exquisitely romantic, exciting, thrilling and compelling. I recommend it unreservedly.

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. He gained a film contract with his first published novel, When the Lion Feeds, which encouraged him to become a full-time writer. He went on to write three long chronicles of the South African experience, which became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick’s advice to “write about what you know best”; his work focuses on southern African ways of life, with emphasis on hunting, mining, romance, and conflict. By the time of his death in 2021, he had published 49 books. They have sold at least 140 million copies.