Ronald F. Delderfield Boeken

This stirring saga follows seven comrades and heroes through the tumult of the Napoleonic Wars as they fight for their lives from Austria to Portugal, from France to Russia, until they confront their destiny at Waterloo. Drawn from stories left behind by the soldiers of the First Empire, this dramatic tale rings true in both triumph and defeat.

Beautiful, resourceful, treacherous, vulnerable - she was a woman full of contradictions and he would never stop loving her. As a young girl Diana is irrepressible, untameable and, to the orphaned John, endlessly fascinating. Only daughter of a wealthy businessman, she is drawn both to a rigorous outdoor life in the west country with her horses and the glittering London society that will be her destiny. They spend a magical unconventional childhood together but Diana's ambition, her passion for life that makes her so desirable, pulls her away from all that makes her happy. The fierce friendship that grew inevitably to love, develops as inevitably to conflict and a betrayal that will mark them both - until the trials of war offers them redemption.

This is the story of five families who live in a quiet avenue in the suburbs of Greater London. It is a story of their hopes and dreams and their mounting fears as war looms and threatens to destroy all that they treasure.

The real motive wasn't love and it wasn't greed . . . It rose to the surface out of a grey pit of boredom. When Charlie Pritchard is shown a way to escape his mundane and monotonous life as a small-town bank clerk in a tiny Welsh resort in the 1920s, and live instead in wealth with beautiful Delphine, he knows that this is his only chance. And he has to take it - even if the plan is to rob his own bank. However, as zero hour approaches he realises that there is far more at stake than he had ever imagined, and that there will be no escape, no escape at all.

Dieser Bestseller-Roman, der in der gnadenlosen Welt des viktorianischen Handels spielt, folgt dem Schicksal von Adam Swann, einem Nachkommen einer Militärfamilie und Veteran von Feldzügen im Krimkrieg und in Indien, auf seiner Suche, seine eigene Finanzdynastie zu gründen. Sein Kampf um Erfolg und seine Eroberung von Henrietta, der temperamentvollen Tochter eines wohlhabenden Herstellers, treiben eine reichhaltig verwobene Geschichte voran, die den Leser von den staubigen Ebenen Indiens zu den überfüllten Slums des London des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts führt, von dem Chaos der großen Industriestädte dieser Zeit zu den friedlichen Gewissheiten der englischen Landschaft.

Das Tal der Craddocks - bk937; Ehrenwirth Verlag; R.F. Delderfield; Paperback; 1970