Imagine the guns of France and Russia thundering across the Home Counties: William Le Queux's The Great War in England in 1897 is the sensational future-war fantasy that gripped a nervous nation.
First serialised in 1894, this bestselling shocker imagines a near-future Britain overrun by a hostile coalition, its cities besieged and its countryside laid to waste before a desperate fightback begins. Le Queux (1864 – 1927) was among the most prolific and widely read authors of his day, and here he pioneered the 'invasion literature' that fed Victorian anxieties about foreign attack and national unpreparedness. A forerunner of modern science fiction and the military thriller alike, it stands beside his later triumph The Invasion of 1910.