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Originally Posted by ATDrake
Anyway, back on topic, they're more "grand sweeping saga" than action/adventure type historicals, but I always kind of liked James Clavell's Asian Saga novels, of which Shogun (very much thinly veiled story of Will Adams, known as "Samurai Will", who was a Dutch-employed Englishman who got shipwrecked in Japan and became employed by Tokugawa Ieyasu and led to the displacement of the Portuguese with the Dutch as the main traders until the Japanese cut off all foreign contact) is probably the best (and it's got a rather good miniseries adaptation with Toshiro Mifune in it).
His WWII-set prisoner of war story King Rat is excellent and also made into a very good movie with Alec Guinness.
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My only beef with Shogun was that James Clavell's book should have been a Historical Fiction Book. Except he changed the names of the major Historical characters. This made it harder for me to read. Imagine someone writing a Historical Fiction book about the American Revolution or Waterloo and changed the Historical Figures names.
James Clavell's King Rat was based on his experiences as a Japanese POW during WWII. If I remember correctly he was 17 or 18 when he was captured.
Apache