Dawn Like Thunder - Hardcover

Acclaimed as the foremost naval writer of the twentieth century, Douglas Reeman was born in Thames Ditton, Surrey, England in 1924. With the outbreak of World War Two, he joined the Royal Navy at the age of sixteen. He saw service in the North Sea and Arctic, and the Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns, beginning as a midshipman in destroyers and transferring later to motor torpedo boats, where he was twice mentioned in dispatches. Following the war, he held a variety of jobs, including delivering yachts, selling marine engines, and walking the beat in London's East End as a uniformed policeman and in the plain-clothes Criminal Investigation Department. He returned to active service during the Korean War, and remained a naval reservist while working as a children's welfare officer for the London County Council. In 1957, having published two short stories, Douglas wrote the fictionalized version of "his war" more for his own satisfaction than out of any hope of publication. "A Prayer for the Ship," was published in 1958, and was the beginning of a remarkable career. Ten years later, having established himself as one of the foremost modern sea-story writers of his time, Douglas returned to an earlier love, the ships and men of Nelson's day, and embarked on a new and challenging phase: a series of novels featuring one man and spanning that splendid, stirring era. For this series he chose the pseudonym Alexander Kent. In June of 1968, "To Glory We Steer" was published, and its hero, Richard Bolitho, was introduced to a growing readership. Today the exploits of Richard and Adam Bolitho are featured in twenty-eight novels, the lives and deaths of other men, equally heroic, in thirty-five Reeman novels. Kent and Reeman are published in fourteen languages around the world, including Finnish, Polish, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, and count thousands of Germans and Japanese among their most passionate adherents. More than twenty-three million copies have been sold.

"If anyone deserves to be 'piped' into bookshops with full naval honours, it is Douglas Reeman, without question master of both genres of naval fiction—historical and modern." —Books Magazine

"Masterly storytelling." —the Times

"Authentic, inspiring, well-characterized and, finally, moving." —Sunday Times