Bernard Cornwell · 1998 · overland

Bernard Cornwell's novel of the siege of Gawilghur, December 1803, and the last of the India trilogy. Commissioned from the ranks and hated for it, Ensign Sharpe is made a quartermaster and bullied out of the fighting - while the army marches on a fortress on a two-thousand-foot cliff that its garrison considers simply impossible to take.

1. 1
   Assaye

   Sharpe's battlefield commission has made him an officer that no officer wants: too old, too common and too obviously promoted for something the mess would rather not discuss - and he is given the baggage to look after.

2. 2
   Argaum

   At Argaum the Mahratta army is broken again in an evening action, and the survivors fall back on the one place they believe the British cannot follow - the fortress in the hills above the plain.

3. 3
   Gawilghur

   Gawilghur stands on a cliff above a ravine with three gates in succession behind it, and the garrison has good reason to think it cannot fall - and Sharpe, who is not supposed to be in the assault at all, finds the way up.