Sid Smith, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, described by the Times Literary Supplement as "one of Britain's most original authors", introduces wicked Josiah Nisbet, Horatio Nelson's (real-life) stepson, and his (not so real) adventures.
Newly signed into the Royal Navy, Mr Midshipman Nisbet discovers that Nelson is betraying his wife, Nisbet's mother, with a seductive intelligence agent. Thus begins Nisbet's chaotic naval life. Enraged and incompetent, he single-handedly wrecks Britain's major land campaign against the French, launches the career of an obscure artillery officer called Napoleon Bonaparte and wreaks a deadly vengeance on the world's greatest naval hero – a vengeance which culminated in the events described in a companion volume, Nisbet and Trafalgar.