Soldier of the Queen

"The Boer War, a defining period in our history, was eclipsed by the Great War, and subsequently neglected by writers. With this entertaining and diligently researched novel, Malcolm Archibald helps to restore the balance." (Michael J. Hunt) "Malcolm Archibald's Drew Selkirk is not yet a Captain Aubrey or a Richard Sharpe but he could become one. "Soldier of the Queen" is an engrossing and successful first novel. The portrayal of rural life in the Scottish borders at the end of the nineteenth century is memorably and vividly portrayed as is the transformation into the raw and often brutal life of the volunteer, professional army of late Victorian Britain. However, Archibald's writing really comes into its own in the well researched dramatic portrayal of the battles against the Boers. He has greatly to his credit sucessfully described the confusion, heroism, brutality, compassion and stupidity which characterised those encounters on the Veldt." T.Ken Jones