Where were you at Waterloo?

Nicholas Best’s first novel, a satire of army life. One morning the Gobelin Guards are Trooping the Colour. The next day they are flown out to the Indian Ocean to defend the island of British Casuarina from invasion.

Vainly awaiting the intruding enemy from a neighbouring republic, they become entangled with local whores seeking medication and marriage, an expense-hungry war correspondent filing stories of imaginary battles, a film director staging scenes for an army recruitment documentary, and a drug-smuggling guerrilla leader who learned his military skills as an officer cadet in the British army.

Book Author

Nicholas Best grew up in Kenya, of Anglo-Irish origin, and was educated there, in England, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served a spell in Britain’s Grenadier Guards, during which he was airlifted to Belize to prevent its invasion by Guatemalan tanks - an experience that gave him his first short story (in Penthouse) and a satirical novel Where were you at Waterloo? Thereafter he worked in London as a financial journalist before becoming a full time writer. He is the author of Happy Valley: the Story of the English in Kenya, Tennis and the Masai (a comic novel later seri...
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Book Reviews

• Times Literary Supplement
  "As a satire on military bigotry and shambling officialdom, Where were you at Waterloo? is places as sharp as Waugh and sometimes better"
• Financial Times
  "Combines military satire with exotic thrills in a book reminiscent at its best of that sublime beast Black Mischief"
• Daily Telegraph
  "All good, clean fun and never heavy-handed"