'The Thirteen Gun Salute' opens with Jack Aubrey reinstated to his command and sailing on a secret mission with a hand-picked crew, most of them shipmates from the adventures and lucrative voyages of earlier years. Patrick O'Brian's resourcefulness is a sure warrant that things will not turn out as his readers or his characters expect. Twists and turns, sub-plots, echoes from the past, these are the only certainties in this astonishing 'roman fleuve'. Distant waters, exotic scenes, flora and fauna to satisfy Aubrey's old friend Stephen Maturin's innocent curiosity, as well as the scope for his cloak and dagger work, enrich its flow. The ending of the book leaves the reader more than usually impatient for its successor.

'Patrick O'Brian is one of the most compelling and brilliant novelists of his time with a huge band of admirers in all manner of places. Beyond his superbly elegant writing, wit and originality, he showed an understanding of the nature of a floating world at the mercy of the wind and the sea which has never been surpassed.

'Jane Austen, 'sur mer''
Bob Doe, 'Times Educational Supplement'

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).

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey/Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It contains all the action and excitement which could possibly be hoped for in a historical novel, but it also displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors: his depiction of the detail of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience, of the landscape and of the sea. O’Brian’s portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute. His power of characterisation is above all masterly.

This brilliant historical novel marked the début of a writer who grew into one of our greatest novelists ever, the author of what Alan Judd, writing in the Sunday Times, has described as ‘the most significant extended story since Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time’.

"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

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. But 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 here so freshly and vividly conveyed.

Patrick O’Brian is regarded by many as the greatest historical novelist now writing. Post Captain, the second novel in his remarkable Aubrey/Maturin series, led Mary Renault to write: ‘Master and Commander raised dangerously high expectations; Post Captain triumphantly surpasses them.’

This tale begins with Jack Aubrey arriving home from his exploits in the Mediterranean to find England at peace following the Treaty of Amiens. He and his friend Stephen Maturin, surgeon and secret agent, begin to live the lives of country gentlemen, hunting, entertaining and enjoying more amorous adventures. Their comfortable existence, however, is cut short when Jack is overnight reduced to a pauper with enough debts to keep him in prison for life. He flees to the continent to seek refuge: instead he finds himself a hunted fugitive as Napoleon has ordered the internment of all Englishmen in France. Aubrey’s adventures in escaping from France and the debtors’ prison will grip the reader as fast as his unequalled actions at sea.

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.

H.M.S. Surprise follows the variable fortunes of Captain Jack Aubrey’s career in Nelson’s navy as he attempts to hold his ground against admirals, colleagues and the enemy, accepting a mission to convey a British ambassador to the East Indies. The voyage takes him and his friend Stephen Maturin to the strange sights and smells of the Indian sub-continent, and through the archipelago of spice islands where the French have a near-overwhelming superiority.

Rarely has a novel managed to convey more vividly the fragility of a sailing ship in a wild sea. Rarely has a historical novelist combined action and lyricism of style in the way that O’ Brian does. His superb sense of place, brilliant characterisation, and a vigour and joy of writing lift O’Brian above any but the most exalted of comparisons.

The War of 1812 continues, and Captain Jack Aubrey sets course for Cape Horn on a mission after his own heart: intercepting a powerful American frigate outward bound to wreak havoc with the British whaling trade. Meanwhile, Stephen Maturin has a mission of his own in the world of secret intelligence and comes face to face with the harsh realities for women of the age. Disaster in various guises awaits them in the Great South Sea and in the far reaches of the Pacific-typhoons, castaways, shipwrecks, an ill-fated affair, murder, and criminal insanity-as well as a bold rescue by a crew of seafaring female warriors.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans of many battles, return in this novel to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But Jack is now a senior Captain commanding a line-of-battle ship sent out to reinforce the squadron blockading Toulon, and this is a longer, harder, colder war than the dashing frigate action of his early days.

A sudden turn of events takes him and Stephen off on a hazardous mission to the Greek islands. All his old skills of seamanship, and his proverbial luck when fighting against odds, come triumphantly into their own. The book ends with as fierce and thrilling an action as any in this magnificent series of novels.

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.

?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.

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.

Jack Aubrey returns from his duties protecting whalers off the South American coast and is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make investments in the City on the strength of supposedly certain information. From there he is led into the half-worlds of the London criminal underground and of government espionage – the province of his friend, Stephen Maturin.

Devoted readers of Patrick O'Brian will find here all the brilliance of characterisation and all the sparkle of dialogue they have come to expect from a novelist often described as 'Jane Austen 'sur mer''. For those who will read him for the first time there will be the pleasure of discovering a novelist of unique character.

"While his stories tell of men at war, he is a novelist of great gentleness of spirit. A pervasive serenity, a generosity towards human frailty, are among the qualities which have made his books irresistible. ..He is the most brilliant historical novelist of modern times."
MAX HASTINGS, 'Evening Standard'

"These novels are a brilliant achievement. They display staggering erudition on almost all aspects of eighteenth-century life."
'Times Literary Supplement'

Following the extraordinary success of The Yellow Admiral, this latest Aubrey-Maturin novel brings alive the sights and sounds of North Africa as well as the great naval battles in the days immediately following Napoleon?s escape from Elba. Aubrey and Maturin are in the thick of the plots and counterplots to prevent his regaining power. Coloured by conspiracies in the Adriatic, in the Berber and Arab lands of the southern shores of the Mediterranean, by night actions, fierce pursuits, slave-trading and lion hunts, The Hundred Days is a masterpiece.

?O?Brian is far and away the best of the Napoleonic storytellers and The Hundred Days is one of the best of the series: a classic naval adventure, crammed with incident, superbly plotted and utterly gripping?This is O?Brian at his brilliant, entertaining best and when he is on this form the rest of us who write of the Napoleonic conflict might as well give up and try a new career. Fans of the series will need no encouragement to buy this book, but if you are new to Aubrey and Maturin then this is as splendid an introduction as you could wish for.? Bernard Cornwell

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'

Captain Jack Aubrey, a brilliant and experienced officer, has been struck off the list of post-captains for a crime he did not commit. His old friend Stephen Maturin, usually cast as a ship's surgeon to mask his discreet activities on behalf of British Intelligence, has bought for Aubrey his former ship the Surprise to command as a privateer, more politely termed a letter of marque. Together they sail on a desperate mission against the French, which, if successful, may redeem Aubrey from the private hell of his disgrace. A nighttime battle with an unusual climax, a jewel of great value, and Maturin's fondness for opium make this segment of Patrick O'Brian's masterful series both original and profoundly exciting.

At the opening of a voyage filled with disaster and delight, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are in pursuit of a privateer sailing under American colours through the Great South Sea. Stephen's objective is to set the revolutionary tinder of South America ablaze in order to relieve the British government which, already engaged in a death-struggle with a Europe dominated by Napoleon, has blundered into war with the young and uncomfortably vigorous United States.

The shock and barbarity of hand-to-hand fighting are sharpened by O'Brian's exact sense of period, his eye for landscape and his feel for a ship under sail. His thrilling descriptions of hair-raising and bloody actions make the reader grateful that he is watching from a distance.

'If O'Brian's novels have become a cult, this is because they are truly addictive. They are, quite magnificently, adventure yarns whose superb authenticity never distracts from the sheer thrill of the action. What brings the research to life is O'Brian's vivid evocation of the individual atmosphere aboard each different ship – the inner weather, as it were, of a floating world dependent on the literal wind and waves.'
Caroline Moore, 'Sunday Telegraph'

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.

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'

The Yellow Admiral ? the eighteenth novel in the sequence hailed as the greatest series of historical novels ever written ? sets the fall and rise of Jack Aubrey in brilliant counterpoint to the fall and rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Life ashore may once again be the undoing of Jack Aubrey. Even Jack?s exploits at sea turn sour in the storm waters off Brest. Worst of all, in the spring of 1814 peace breaks out. But Stephen Maturin returns from a mission in France with news that the Chileans require the service of English officers. Jack is savouring this reprieve for his career when he receives an urgent despatch ordering him to Gibraltar: Napoleon has escaped from Elba.

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'

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.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by despatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attentions of two privateers soon become menacing.

The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as thrilling, as tense and as unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O’Brian has written. Then, among other things, follows a shipwreck and a particularly sinister internment in the notorious Temple Prison in Paris. Once again, the tigerish and fascinating Diana Villiers redresses the balance in this man’s world of seamanship and war.

Jack Aubrey's long service is at last rewarded: he is promoted to the rank of Commodore and given a squadron of ships to command. His mission is twofold - to make a large dent in the slave trade off the coast of Africa and, on his return, to intercept a French fleet set for Bantry Bay with a cargo of weapons for the disaffected among the Irish. Invention and surprise follow at every turn in this tale of nineteenth-century seamanship, as rich, as compelling, as masterly as any of its predecessors.