Product details
- ISBN 9780006499183
- Weight: 270g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jan 1997
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Life ashore on half pay, despite the joys of family life, is unlikely to satisfy a man of action such as Jack Aubrey. The sea calls to him. And so, when his friend, ship’s surgeon and secret agent Stephen Maturin, arrives with secret orders, Aubrey soon finds himself in command of a frigate and setting sail for the Cape of Good Hope.
But, in Nelson’s navy, there are as many enemies within as without.
‘A few books work their way . . . onto [bestseller] lists by genuine, lasting excellence – witness The Lord of the Rings, or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories.’
URSULA K. LE GUIN
‘I devoured Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-volume masterpiece as if it had been so many tots of Jamaica grog.’
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
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.
