Fortune of War
En route to England and his next command, Captain Jack Aubrey, and his friend, ship’s surgeon and secret agent Stephen Maturin, find themselves swept up in the War of 1812. As Aubrey convalesces from his wounds in a Boston hospital, awaiting the next prisoner exchange, Maturin’s past activities as a spy return to haunt him and precipitate both men into new and unexpected dangers.
Love and betrayal vie for supremacy as the two friends face peril around every corner.
‘The Fortune of War is a marvellously full-flavoured, engrossing book, which towers over its current rivals in the genre like a three-decker over a ship’s longboat.’
T. J. BINYON, Times Literary Supplement
‘There is nothing in this century that rivals Patrick O’Brian’s achievement.’
AMANDA FOREMAN
Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel long Aubrey–Maturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.