The Trooper: Book One: The Last Horse Series (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798195447380)

In the dying days of the nineteenth century, eighteen-year-old Thomas Mallory leaves the quiet forge of his Warwickshire village for the dusty, dangerous plains of South Africa. Armed with his father's regimental button and a volume of Plutarch, Thomas joins the 7th Hussars, eager to find the glory and "private conversation" between man and horse he has read about in books.

But the Boer War is not the heroic saga of the ancients. It is a war of scorched earth, mechanical slaughter, and the crushing scale of the veldt. As Thomas navigates the brutal reality of the campaign alongside his faithful mare, Mabel, he discovers the unbridgeable gap between the dream of the cavalry and the harsh dawn of 20th-century warfare.

The Trooper is a gripping work of historical fiction that explores the end of an era-where the ancient tradition of the horseman meets the indifferent power of modern empire.