DescriptionUniquely among authors of naval fiction, Patrick O'Brian's characters develop with experience, and although the Jack Aubrey of Treason's Harbour has a record of successes to equal that of the most brilliant of Nelson's band of brothers, and is no less formidable or decisive in action, he has grown wiser, kinder, and gentler too. Much of the novel's plot concerns intelligence and counter-intelligence, the field in which Aubrey's friend Stephen Maturin excels, and there is action and excitement aplenty, but it is the atmosphere of Malta that is so freshly and vividly conveyed here, crowded with senior officers waiting for news of the French and wondering whether the war will end before they get their turn for prize money and fame.
DescriptionJack 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.
DescriptionAt 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 to relieve the pressure on 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 the 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 bloody actions make the listener grateful that he is watching from a distance.
DescriptionJack 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, so that the misery of ejection from the service can be palliated by the command of what Aubrey calls a 'private man-of-war', a letter of marque, a privateer. 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. Around these simple, ostensibly familiar elements Patrick O'Brian has written a novel of great narrative power, exploring his extraordinary world once more, in a tale full of human feeling and rarely matched in its drama.
DescriptionCaptain Jack Aubrey, RN, arrives in the Dutch East Indies to find himself appointed to the command of the fastest and best armed frigate in the Navy. He and his friend Stephen Maturin take passage for England in a despatch vessel. But the war of 1812 breaks out while they are en route. Bloody actions precipitate them both into new and unexpected scenes where Stephen's past activities as a secret agent return on him with a vengeance.
