Retribution Road

"We owe you our lives, Sergeant, but you are our worst nightmare . . ." Burma, 1852. Arthur Bowman, a sergeant in the East India Company, is sent on a secret mission during the Second Anglo-Burmese War. But the expedition is foiled - his men are captured and tortured. Throughout their ordeal, a single word becomes Bowman's mantra, a word that will stiffen their powers of endurance in the face of unimaginable suffering: survival. But despite his determination, only a handful escape with their lives. Some years later in London, battling his ghosts through a haze of alcohol and opium, Bowman discovers a mutilated corpse in a sewer. The victim appears to have been subjected to the same torments as Bowman endured in the Burmese jungle. And the word ‘survival’ has been daubed in blood by the body's side. Persuaded that the culprit is one of the men who shared his captivity, Bowman resolves to hunt him down. From the Burmese jungle to the slums of London to the conquest of the Wild West, author Antonin Varenne takes us on a thrilling journey full of sound and unabated fury, reviving the lapsed tradition of the great writers of boundless adventure. Sergeant Bowman belongs to that breed of heroes who inhabit the imaginations of Conrad, Kipling, Stevenson… lost soldiers who have plunged into the heart of darkness and will cross the globe in search of vengeance and redemption. The third novel by Antoinin Varenne to be translated, as the Financial Times writes, ‘what is boldest here is the genre-splicing, with elements from Western, detective and even war novel kept in exhilarating balance’; the result is a riveting read.