Sharpe's Tiger

Sharpe's Tiger is a historical novel by the English writer Bernard Cornwell, first published in 1997. It is the fifteenth book written in the Richard Sharpe series but the first in chronological order, describing how the character began.

The other Sharpe novels begin in 1809, with Sharpe as a captain in the Peninsular War in Spain. This one goes back to 1799, when he is a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot serving in southern India during the Mysore Wars, and it explains how a man with no money and no education ended up with a commission. The story takes him into the camp of Tipu Sultan's forces in disguise, alongside a sergeant he cannot trust, in the middle of the siege that will decide the campaign. Cornwell had already written more than a dozen books about Sharpe's later career before he went back to fill in the beginning, and the result is a prequel that stands on its own as a military adventure.

The series runs to more than twenty novels and returns repeatedly to the same character's rise through the ranks of the British army of the period.