Essex Dogs: The epic Richard & Judy Summer Book Club Pick 2023 from a Sunday Times bestselling historian (Essex Dogs Series 1)

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Essex Dogs is silky smooth, guiding the reader through the story with a stripped back prose that allows us to really engage with the story. This could have been a subtle shift on the myth but instead becomes a Blackadder the First style pastiche that doesn't work as effectively as I suspect Jones thinks it does.

The world-building was phenomenal; I felt like I could smell the countryside they were trekking through. So up to the end I enjoyed the book and probably more than if I knew much about the Battle of Crecy which I do not. Nevertheless, things did pick-up but since I knew the book would probably end at Crecy and the outcome of that battle is known the suspense was created in the fictional elements of the plot involving the Dogs and their personal circumstances.Dan Jones' debut novel is an impressive work of historical fiction set in the Hundred Years' War and, more particularly, during the Crecy Campaign. Reading the stories of Loveday and Co is like being a fly on the wall to an epic moment in history but it lacks narrative flair.

I think if you want a realism check on medieval warfare then this is a good read; if you want some sympathetic human interest too then maybe not so good. The one distinct character voice in the story is Northampton, but his voice is so over the top that he ends up sounding like some post-watershed character from Blackadder.He is that rare, very rare, historian that seems to understand that if you want your books to sell then the average reader has to like them and be entertained by them. The narrative is well written and you can almost hear the clash of swords, the screams of horses and the groans of dying men as the two armies clash.