I can heartily recommend the Sharpe series of books - quite a bit different from the films. I've just finished the entire series in chronological order. Richard Sharpe is a bastard, but a magnificent one
Death of Grass (aka No Blade of Grass) is pretty good. Sort of post-Apoc, but where the apocalypse is the devastation of the worlds grass based food stocks (rice, wheat etc) by a plague.
And I can't let a thread like this go by without mentioning a couple of my favourite sci-fi/cyberpunk books - Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams.
