Description

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The beginning of the sweeping Aubrey-Maturin series. "The best sea story I have ever read."—Sir Francis Chichester

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.

About the Author

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One of our greatest contemporary novelists, Patrick O’Brian is the author of the twenty volumes of the best-selling Aubrey/Maturin series, as well as many other books, including Testimonies, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore, and biographies of Joseph Banks and Picasso.

Praise For…

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My hero is Patrick O'Brian…I read all of his books many, many times. I’ve read them so many times I can’t read them anymore because eventually you know the whole book by heart.
— David Mamet - New York Magazine

The best historical novels ever written.
— Richard Snow - New York Times Book Review

Taken as a whole, the Aubrey-Maturin novels are by a long shot the best things of their kind…they are uniquely excellent.
— Terry Teachout - New York Times Book Review

There are two types of people in the world: Patrick O’Brian fans, and people who haven’t read him yet.
— Lucy Eyre - The Guardian

[The series shows] a joy in language that jumps from every page…you're in for a wonderful voyage.
— Cutler Durkee - People

One does not get many pages into the Aubrey-Maturin sequence before falling under the spell of O'Brian's prose, which is…elegantly paced, quietly witty.
— Katherine A. Powers - The Atlantic

If Jane Austen had written rousing sea yarns, she would have produced something very close to the prose of Patrick O'Brian.
— Time

O'Brian is a novelist, pure and simple, one of the best we have.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

I prefer the Aubrey-Maturin series to all others, even Holmes-Watson. Every book is packed to absolute straining with erudition, wit, history, and thunderous action.
— Joe Hill