Ardent, gregarious British naval officer Jack Aubrey is elated to be given his first appointment as commander: the fourteen-gun ship HMS Sophie. Meanwhile-after a heated first encounter that nearly comes to a duel-Aubrey and a brilliant but down-on-his-luck physician, Stephen Maturin, strike up an unlikely rapport. On a whim, Aubrey invites Maturin to join his crew as the Sophie's surgeon. And so begins the legendary friendship that anchors this beloved saga set against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Through every ensuing adventure on which Aubrey and Maturin embark, from the witty parley of their lovers and enemies to the roar of broadsides as great ships close in battle around them, O'Brian "provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises-comic, grim, farcical and tragic.... [A] whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit" (A. S. Byatt).

"The finest writer of sea-stories in the English language."—J. de Courcy Ireland

All Patrick O'Brian's strengths are on parade in this novel of action and intrigue, set partly in Malta, partly in the treacherous, pirate-infested waters of the Red Sea. While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assumes the center stage for the dockyards and salons of Malta are alive with Napoleon's agents, and the admiralty's intelligence network is compromised. Maturin's cunning is the sole bulwark against sabotage of Aubrey's daring mission.

"Splendid adventures...polished, historically accurate, and intensely pleasurable."—Kirkus Reviews

"O'Brian's narrative...provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises—comic, grim, farcical and tragic. An essential of the truly gripping book for the narrative addict is the creation of a whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit, and O'Brian does this with prodigal specificity and generosity."—A. S. Byatt

The recent release of the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has focused even more attention on the publishing phenomenon of the late Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels about the Royal Navy in the age of Nelson. These five volumes, beautifully produced and boxed, contain over 7,000 pages of what has often been described as a single, continuous narrative. They are a perfect tribute to such a literary achievement, and a perfect gift for the serious O'Brian enthusiast.

Blue at the Mizzen (novel #20) ended with Jack Aubrey getting the news, in Chile, of his elevation to flag rank: Rear Admiral of the Blue Squadron, with orders to sail to the South Africa station. The next novel, unfinished and untitled at the time of the author's death, would have been the chronicle of that mission, and much else besides. The three chapters left on O'Brian's desk are presented here both in printed version-including his corrections to the typescript-and a facsimile of his manuscript, which goes several pages beyond the end of the typescript to include a duel between Stephen Maturin and an impertinent officer who is courting his fiancee. Of course we would rather have had the whole story; instead we have this proof that O'Brian's powers of observation, his humor, and his understanding of his characters were undiminished to the end. Includes a Facsimile of the Manuscript.

Captain Jack Aubrey sets sail for the South China Sea with a new lease on life as a privateer. Now he is to shepherd Stephen Maturin-his friend, ship's surgeon, and sometimes intelligence agent-on a diplomatic mission to prevent links between Bonaparte and the Malay princes that would put English merchant shipping at risk. Along their journey, Maturin climbs the Thousand Steps of the sacred crater of the orangutans; a killer typhoon catches Aubrey and his crew trying to work the Diane off a reef; and, in the barbaric court of Pulo Prabang, a classic duel of intelligence agents unfolds: the French envoys, well entrenched in the Sultan's good graces, against the savage cunning of Stephen Maturin.

Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels

"A scholarly (though often hilarious) triumph of culinary anthropology."—Washington Post

Celebrate the joys of Patrick O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin series with this delightful cookbook, full of the food and drink that so often complement Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin's travels. Collected here are authentic and practical recipes for such eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- century dishes as Burgoo, Drowned Baby, Sea-Pie, Solomongundy, Jam Roly-Poly, Toasted Cheese, Sucking Pig, Treacle-Dowdy, and, of course, Spotted Dog. Also included are historical notes on the origins of the dishes as well as sections on the preparing of roasts, puddings, and raised pies.

"[A] splendid cookbook...graced with erudite bits of naval and gastronomical history....Deftly researched and written in prose nearly as funny as O'Brian's own."—Publishers Weekly

"A thoroughly readable cookbook, as well as a useful appendix to a great series of novels and a newly opened window into a time now nearly 200 years gone."—San Jose Mercury News

?If we had only two or three of Patrick O?Brian?s Aubrey-Maturin series, we would count ourselves lucky; with six or seven the author would be safely among the greats of historical fiction? This is great writing by an undiminished talent. Now on to Volume Twenty, and the liberation of Chile.? WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE, Literary Review

This is the twentieth book in Patrick O?Brian?s highly acclaimed, bestselling series chronicling the adventures of lucky Jack Aubrey and his best friend Stephen Maturin, part ship?s doctor, part secret agent. The novel?s stirring action follows on from that of The Hundred Days. Napoleon?s hundred days of freedom and his renewed threat to Europe have ended at Waterloo and Aubrey has finally, as the title suggests, become a blue level admiral. He and Maturin have ? at last ? set sail on their much postponed mission to Chile. Vivid with the salty tang of life at sea, O?Brian?s writing is as powerful as ever whether he writes of naval hierarchies, night-actions or the most celebrated fictional friendship since that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Blue at the Mizzen also brings alive the sights and sounds of revolutionary South America in a story as exciting as any O?Brian has written.

Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her way to South America—where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain—the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences. The South American expedition is a desperate affair; and in the end Jack's bold initiative to strike at the vastly superior Spanish fleet precipitates a spectacular naval action that will determine both Chile's fate and his own.

It's 1802. The Treaty of Amiens has brought an end to the hostilities between Great Britain and France. Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval surgeon Stephen Maturin, are enjoying the respite in the English countryside, besotted with two beautiful cousins, Sophie Williams and Diana Villiers-until Aubrey loses his fortune and they flee to France to escape his creditors. While in France, Napoleon smashes the Peace of Amiens and war begins anew. Aubrey and Maturin, now finding themselves behind enemy lines, make their way back to England. Maturin is sent to Spain on an intelligence-gathering mission and the now-solvent Aubrey assumes command of a strange warship, pursuing his quarry straight into the mouth of a French-held harbor. Amidst the rollicking adventures at sea and mishaps on land, Aubrey and Maturin's friendship is tested by their romantic entanglements with the cousins in this brilliant second installment of the epic series.

Stranded in Malta, Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin must be careful, for the salons and dockyards are infested with Napoleon's spies, and there is a traitor in the British intelligence network. This installment of Patrick O'Brian's "20-volume masterpiece" (Christopher Hitchens) takes Aubrey and Maturin sailing on the pirate-plagued waters of the Red Sea, trudging over the Sinai Peninsula and even the depths of the sea floor in their efforts to stay one step ahead of the treachery afoot.

Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon Stephen Maturin sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy-and a treacherous disease that decimates the crew. With a Dutch man-of-war to windward, the undermanned, outgunned Leopard sails for her life into the freezing waters of the Antarctic, where, in mountain seas, the Dutchman closes.

Shipwrecked on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies, Captain Aubrey, surgeon and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck. A vicious attack by Malay pirates is repulsed, but the makeshift vessel burns, and they are truly marooned. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the whimsy and ingenuity of Patrick O'Brian-or Stephen Maturin-could devise. In command now of a new ship, the Nutmeg, Aubrey pursues his interrupted mission. The dreadful penal colony in New South Wales, harrowingly described, is the backdrop to a diplomatic crisis provoked by Maturin's Irish temper, and to a near-fatal encounter with the wildlife of the Australian outback.

Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon, Stephen Maturin, sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy — and a treacherous disease which decimates the crew.

The ingredients of a wonderfully powerful and dramatic O’Brian novel are heightened by descriptive writing of rare quality. Nowhere in contemporary prose have the majesty and terror of the sea been more effectively rendered than in the thrilling chase through an Antarctic storm in which Jack’s ship, under-manned and out-gunned, is the quarry not the hunter.

British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, with his great love, Diana Villiers, speed home to England with news of their latest victory over the Americans. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the trio run into trouble when they attract the menacing attention of two American privateers. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks-and the highs and lows of the love affair between Maturin and Villiers-is as tense, stirring, and unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O'Brian has written in his epic series.

Having survived a long and desperate adventure in the Great South Sea, Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to England to very different circumstances. For Jack it is a happy homecoming, at least initially, but for Stephen it is disastrous: his little daughter appears to be autistic, incapable of speech or contact, while his wife, Diana, unable to bear this situation, has disappeared, her house being looked after by the widowed Clarissa Oakes. Much of The Commodore takes place on land, in sitting rooms and in drafty castles, but the roar of the great guns is never far from our hearing. Aubrey and Maturin are sent on a bizarre decoy mission to the fever-ridden lagoons of the Gulf of Guinea to suppress the slave trade. But their ultimate destination is Ireland, where the French are mounting an invasion that will test Aubrey's seamanship and Maturin's resourcefulness as a secret intelligence agent. The subtle interweaving of these disparate themes is an achievement of pure storytelling by one of our greatest living novelists.

A British whaler has been captured by an ambitious chief in the Sandwich Islands at French instigation, and Captain Jack Aubrey is dispatched with the Surprise to restore order. But stowed away in the cable-tier is an escaped female convict. To the officers, Clarissa Harvill is an object of awkward courtliness and dangerous jealousies. Aubrey himself is won over and indeed strongly attracted to this woman who will not speak of her past. But only Aubrey's friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, can fathom Harvill's secrets: her crime, her personality, and a clue identifying a highly-placed English spy in the pay of Napoleon's intelligence service. In a thrilling finale, Patrick O'Brian delivers all the excitement his many readers expect: Aubrey and the crew of the Surprise impose a brutal pax Britannica upon the islanders in a pitched battle against a band of headhunting cannibals.

A classic memoir of prison breaks and adventure -- a bestselling phenomenon of the 1960s. Condemned for a murder he had not committed, Henri Charriere (nicknamed Papillon) was sent to the penal colony of French Guiana.

Forty-two days after his arrival he made his first break, travelling a thousand gruelling miles in an open boat. Recaptured, he went into solitary confinement and was sent eventually to Devil's Island, a hell-hole of disease and brutality. No one had ever escaped from this notorious prison -- no one until Papillon took to the shark-infested sea supported only by a makeshift coconut-sack raft. In thirteen years he made nine daring escapes, living through many fantastic adventures while on the run -- including a sojourn with South American Indians whose women Papillon found welcomely free of European restraints!

Papillon is filled with tension, adventure and high excitement. It is also one of the most vivid stories of human endurance ever written. Henri Charriere died in 1973 at the age of 66.

Life ashore may once again be the undoing of Jack Aubrey in The Yellow Admiral, Patrick O'Brian's best-selling novel and eighteenth volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Aubrey, now a considerable though impoverished landowner, has dimmed his prospects at the Admiralty by his erratic voting as a Member of Parliament; he is feuding with his neighbor, a man with strong Navy connections who wants to enclose the common land between their estates; he is on even worse terms with his wife, Sophie, whose mother has ferreted out a most damaging trove of old personal letters. Even Jack's exploits at sea turn sour: in the storm waters off Brest he captures a French privateer laden with gold and ivory, but this at the expense of missing a signal and deserting his post. Worst of all, in the spring of 1814, peace breaks out, and this feeds into Jack's private fears for his career. Fortunately, Jack is not left to his own devices. Stephen Maturin returns from a mission in France with the news that the Chileans, to secure their independence, require a navy, and the service of English officers. Jack is savoring this apparent reprieve for his career, as well as Sophie's forgiveness, when he receives an urgent dispatch ordering him to Gibraltar: Napoleon has escaped from Elba.

The adventure continues . . . At the time of his death, Patrick O'Brian had begun to write the twenty-first book in his famous and much-loved Aubrey-Maturin series. The chapters he left behind are presented here, both in printed version and a facsimile of his manuscript, which goes several pages beyond the end of the typescript and includes O'Brian's own marginal notes. The story picks up from the end of Blue at the Mizzen when Jack Aubrey receives the news, in Chile, of his elevation to flag rank: Rear Admiral of the Blue Squadron, with orders to sail to the South Africa station. 'This fragment is both delightful and tantalising, with hints of a plot that might have involved Jack and Stephen with St Helena or Napoleon himself.' Literary Review

Captain Jack Aubrey sails away from the hated Australian prison colonies in his favourite vessel, the 'Surprise', pondering on middle age and sexual frustration. He soon becomes aware that he is out of touch with the mood of his ship: to his astonishment he finds that in spite of a lifetime's experience, he does not know what the foremost hands, or even his own officers are thinking. They know, as he does not, that the 'Surprise' has a stranger on board: and what they, for their part, do not know is that the stranger is potentially as dangerous as a light in the powder magazine itself.

'Few books so entertaining and readable are based on such strong research and grasp of human nature. One moment you laugh out aloud at comedy rooted in character, and the next, storming adventure or danger grips you by the throat…good writing allied to must-read-on storytelling.'
Shaun Usher, 'Daily Mail'

'Thank god for Patrick O'Brian. His genius illuminates the literature of the English language and lightens the lives of those who read him.'
Kevin Myers, 'Irish Times'

Patrick O'Brian is regarded by many as the greatest historical novelist in English. In 'The Nutmeg of Consolation', Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin begin stranded on an uninhabited island in the Dutch East Indies, attacked by ferocious Malay pirates. They contrive their escape, but after a stay in Batavia and a change of ship, are caught up in a night chase in fiercely tidal waters and then embroiled in the much more insidious conflicts of the terrifying penal settlements of New South Wales. It is one of O'Brian's most accomplished and gripping books.

'Some of the success of this great sequence comes from the conviction and huge enthusiasm which O'Brian had for his history. Everything changed the moment he realised the Napoleonic wars were the Englishman's Troy tales, as historically and mythically rich, and imaginatively exploitable as the story that produced 'The Iliad' and all its heirs.'
W.L. Webb, 'Guardian'

'One of the most brilliantly sustained pieces of historical fiction writing this century.'
James Teacher, 'Spectator'

Jack Aubrey is a naval officer, a post-captain of experience and capacity. When 'The Letter of Marque' opens he has been struck off the Navy list for a crime he has not committed.

With Aubrey is his friend and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, who is also an unofficial British intelligence agent. Maturin has bought for Aubrey his old ship, the 'Surprise' as a 'private man-of-war'. Together they sail on a voyage which, if successful, might restore Aubrey to the rank, and the raison d'etre whose loss he so much regrets.

"The success of this great sequence comes from the conviction and huge enthusiasm which O'Brian had for his history. Everything changed when he realised that the Napoleonic wars were the Englishman's Troy tales, as historically and mythically rich, and imaginatively exploitable as the story that produced 'The Iliad'."
W.L. WEBB, 'Guardian'

"From the opening page I was addicted to what I judge to be one of the greatest cycles of storytelling in the English language."
WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE, 'Daily Telegraph'

Set amongst the rolling vineyards and gentle courtyards of a small seaside village in Catalonia, Patrick O'Brian's second novel is a poignant story of tumultuous love, complex faith and one man's desperate bid to reclaim his humanity. Summoned from his medical practice in China by a bevy of anxious aunts, Alain Roig returns to his Catalan hometown to discover he has been nominated by family members with vested interests in the ancestral property to prevent an impending marriage between his cold, ascetic cousin Xavier and Madeleine, a quiet, introspective village girl of unusual beauty. As Alain seeks to understand his cousin's complex motivations for wooing the unhappy girl, he is slowly drawn into Xavier's dark crisis of faith, the well-worn pattern of the sleepy Catalan days and the tight circle of village gossip that surrounds Madeleine. Throughout, Patrick O'Brian's slow, seductive narrative lures the reader into the landscapes, rhythms and passions of Catalonia, while his subtle, insightful characterisation paints a psychological portrait of a unique way of life and two very different men - one generous and impulsive, the other desperate to revive in his soul the dying flames of affection which he senses could be his salvation. With themes and characters that in many ways prefigure his enormously successful Aubrey/Maturin series, THE CATALANS demonstrates all the insight, lyricism and psychological drama that made O'Brian one of the best storytellers of his generation.

The inspiration for the major new motion picture starring Russell Crowe. "A world of enchanting fictional surfaces."—John Bayley, New York Review of Books

The war of 1812 continues, and Jack Aubrey sets course for Cape Horn on a mission after his own heart: intercepting a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. Stephen Maturin has fish of his own to fry in the world of secret intelligence. Disaster in various guises awaits them in the Great South Sea and in the far reaches of the Pacific: typhoons, castaways, shipwrecks, murder, and criminal insanity.

The Far Side of the World is available in two editions: the regular edition featuring the classic cover art of Geoff Hunt, and a movie tie-in edition with a cover photo featuring Russell Crowe, star of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

There's treachery afoot in this, the ninth of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.Uniquely among authors of naval fiction, Patrick O'Brian allows his characters to develop with experience. The Jack Aubrey of Treason's Harbour has a record of successes equal to that of the most brilliant of Nelson's band of brothers and he is no less formidable or decisive in action or strategy. He is wiser, kinder, gentler too.Much of the plot of Treason's Harbour depends on intelligence and counter-intelligence, a field in which Aubrey's friend Stephen Maturin excels. Through him we get a clearer insight into the life and habits of the sea officers of Nelson's time than we would ever obtain seeing things through their own eyes.There is plenty of action and excitement in this novel, but it is the atmosphere of a Malta crowded with senior officers waiting for news of what the French are up to and wondering whether the war will end before their turn comes for prize money and for fame. That is so freshly and vividly conveyed.