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C. S. Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (1899–1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works are The African Queen and the eleven-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era. His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He is also known for writing gritty psychological thrillers that took crime writing in a new direction as they portrayed ordinary people turning in desperation to crime.

Steven Crossley is one of a select group of narrators who have recorded over two hundred audiobooks. He has won multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie and Sharpe's Fury by Bernard Cornwell. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and has established an acting career on both sides of the Atlantic in theater, television, film, and radio drama, performing with distinguished theater companies in New York and London. He is a member of the internationally acclaimed company Complicite. His audiobook performances cover an eclectic range of subjects in both fiction and nonfiction, from thrillers, mysteries, classics, and histories to children's fantasy and biographies.These include works by such writers as Pat Barker, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Sebastian Faulkes, Zadie Smith, Ian McKewan, and Tana French.