I loved this series. Very well written adventure stories with great characters that take you from hornblower's first days in the navy to the near end of his career. The eleven books in the series are comprised of eight novels, two short story collections and the final short story collection which features an incomplete novel published after the author's death. These books are very entertaining and highly recommended if you have an interest in naval history. Forester deliberately keeps hornblower away from big historical events, arguing that the real events already have a hero making hornblower superfluous to history. Instead we get a series of stories in which hornblower is the lead character off having his own heroic success (and failures) in a set of books that are among my favourites. I would recommend reading them in story order rather than publication order as they did dot about in hornblower's history somewhat. Great stuff from a great author.