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Patrick O'Brian (U.S.
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UK)
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| Works by
Patrick O'Brian
(Aka Richard Patrick Russ)
(Writer)
[December 12, 1914 – January 2, 2000] |
Profile created January 31, 2008
Updated August 19, 2009
|
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Master and Commander
(1969)
The opening salvo of the Aubrey-Maturin epic, in
which the surgeon introduces himself to the captain by driving an elbow
into his ribs during a chamber-music recital. Fortunately for millions of
readers, the two quickly make up. Then they commence one of the great
literary voyages of our century, set against an immaculately-detailed
backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. This is the place to start--and in all
likelihood, you won't be able to stop.
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Post Captain
(1972)
In 1803 Napoleon smashes the Peace of Amiens, and
Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., taking refuge in France from his creditors, is
interned. He escapes from France, from debtor's Prison, from a possible
mutiny, and pursues his quarry straight into the mouth of a French-held
harbor.
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HMS Surprise
(1973)
Third in the series of Aubrey/Maturin adventures,
this book is set among the strange sights and smells of the Indian
subcontinent, and in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East
India Company. Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship
against an enemy enjoying overwhelming local superiority. But somewhere in
the Indian Ocean lies the prize that could make him rich beyond his
wildest dream: the ships sent by Napoleon to attack the China Fleet... .
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The Mauritius Command
(1977)
Captain Jack Aubrey is ashore on half pay without a
command--until Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders for Aubrey to
take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant, there
to mount an expedition against the French-held islands or Mauritius and
LaReunion. But the difficulties of carrying out his orders are compounded
by two of his own captains--Lord Clonfert, a pleasure-seeking dilletante,
and Captain Corbett, whose severity pushes his crew to the verge of
mutiny.
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Desolation Island
(1978)
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 that decimates
the crew. With a Dutch man-of-war to windward, the undermanned, outgunned
Leopard sails for her life into the freezing waters of the
Antarctic, where, in mountain seas, the Dutchman closes... .
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The Fortune of War
(1979)
Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., 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 dispatch 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.
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The Surgeon's Mate
(1980)
Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by
dispatch vessel to bring the news of their latest vitory to the
government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in
the Fren intelligence network in the New World, and the attentions of two
privateers soon become menacing. the chase that follows is as thrilling
and unexpected as anything O'Brian has written.
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The Ionian Mission
(1981)
Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans now of
many battles, return in this novel to the seas where they first sailed as
shipmates. But Jack is now senior captain commanding a line-of-battleship
in the Royal Navy's blockage of 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, where all his old skills of seamanship and his proverbial
luck when fighting against all odds come triumphantly into their own.
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Treason's Harbour
(1983)
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.
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The Far Side of the World
(1984)
The War of 1812 continues, and Jack Aubrey sets
course for Cape Horn on a mission after his own heart: intercepting a
powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British
whaling trade. Stephen Maturin has fish of his own to fry in the world of
secret intelligence. Disaster in various guises awaits them in the Great
South Sea and in the far reaches of the pacific: typhoons, castaways,
shipwrecks, murder, and criminal insanity.
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The Reverse of the Medal
(1986)
Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., ashore after a
successful cruise, is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make certain
investments in the City. This innocent decision ensnares him in the London
criminal underground and in government espionage—the province of his
friend Stephen Maturin. Is Aubrey's humiliation and the threatened ruin of
his career a deliberate plot? This dark tale is a fitting backdrop to the
brilliant characterization and sparkling dialogue which O'Brian's readers
have come to expect.
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The Letter of Marque
(1988)
The time is the early 1800s, and the British Navy
stands as the only bulwark against the militant fanaticism of Napoleonic
France. Jack Aubrey, a brilliant and experienced officer, has been struck
off the list of post-captains for a crime his has not committed. His old
friend Stephen Maturin, usually acting as the ship's surgeon to cover his
activities on behalf of British intelligence, has bought for Aubrey his
old ship The Surprise to command as a privateer. Together they
sail on a desperate mission against the French which, if successful, may
redeem Aubrey from the private hell of his disgrace.
From these familiar Patrick O'Brian has created a tale of great narrative
power that rivals C. S. Forester for
suspense, and surpasses him in its perception of character.
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The Thirteen-Gun Salute
(1989)
Captain Jack Aubrey sets sail for the South China
Sea with a new lease on life, having earned reinstatement to the Royal
Navy through his exploits as a privateer. Now he shepherds Stephen Maturin
on a diplomatic mission to prevent links between Bonaparte and the Malay
princes which could put English merchant shipping at risk.
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The Nutmeg of Consolation
(1991)
The fourteenth novel in the classic Aubrey-Maturin
series finds Aubrey and Maturin shipwrecked, harassed by pirates and then
in the brutal penal colonies of New South Wales. Patrick O'Brian is
regarded by many as the greatest living historical novelist writing 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, they are caught up in a night chase in
the 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.
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The Truelove
(1992)
Dispatched with his ship, the Surprise, to
restore order after an attack on a British whaler in Tonga, Captain Aubrey
discovers Clarissa Harvill, an escaped female convict, stowed away in the
cable-tier.
Aka
Clarissa Oakes
(United Kingdom)
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The Wine-Dark Sea
(1993)
At the outset of this adventure filled with disaster
and delight, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin pursue an American privateer
through the great South Sea. Their ship, the Surprise, is now also a
privateer, the better to escape diplomatic complications from Stephen's
mission, which is to ignite the revolutionary tinder of South America.
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The Commodore
(1994)
On a strange decoy mission to the disease-ridden
lagoons of the Gulf of New Guinea, Captain Aubrey and secret intelligence
agent Maturin are ordered to suppress the slave trade, but the French are
mounting an invasion that will give the men added problems.
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The Yellow Admiral
(1996)
Life ashore may once again be the undoing of Jack
Aubrey in The Yellow Admiral, Patrick O'Brian's best-selling novel and
eighteenth volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Aubrey, now a considerable
though impoverished landowner, has dimmed his prospects at the Admiralty
by his erratic voting as a Member of Parliament; he is feuding with his
neighbor, a man with strong Navy connections who wants to enclose the
common land between their estates; he is on even worse terms with his
wife, Sophie, whose mother has ferreted out a most damaging trove of old
personal letters. Even Jack's exploits at sea turn sour: in the storm
waters off Brest he captures a French privateer laden with gold and ivory,
but this at the expense of missing a signal and deserting his post. Worst
of all, in the spring of 1814, peace breaks out, and this feeds into
Jack's private fears for his career. Fortunately, Jack is not left to his
own devices. Stephen Maturin returns from a mission in France with the
news that the Chileans, to secure their independence, require a navy, and
the service of English officers. Jack is savoring this apparent reprieve
for his career, as well as Sophie's forgiveness, when he receives an
urgent dispatch ordering him to Gibraltar: Napoleon has escaped from Elba.
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The Hundred Days
(1998)
Napoleon, escaped from Elba, pursues his enemies
across Europe like a vengeful phoenix. If he can corner the British and
Prussians before their Russian and Austrian allies arrive, his genius will
lead the French armies to triumph at Waterloo. In the Balkans, preparing a
thrust northwards into Central Europe to block the Russians and Austrians,
a horde of Muslim mercenaries is gathering. They are inclined toward
Napoleon because of his conversion to Islam during the Egyptian campaign,
but they will not move without a shipment of gold ingots from Sheik Ibn
Hazm which, according to British intelligence, is on its way via camel
caravan to the coast of North Africa. It is this gold that Jack Aubrey and
Stephen Maturin must at all costs intercept. The fate of Europe hinges on
their desperate mission.
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Blue at the Mizzen
(1999)
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.
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The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey
(2004)
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
at the time of his death 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 fiancée.
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.
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Richard Temple
(1962, 2007)
The protagonist of this World War II novel is a
prisoner of the German army in France. In order to keep himself sane while
denying the charges and absorbing the beatings of his captors, Richard
Temple conducts a minute examination—one might almost call it a
prosecution—of his own life.
Temple escapes from a blighted childhood and his widowed, alcoholic mother
thanks to an artistic gift, the one thing of value he has to his name. His
life as a painter in London of the '30s is cruelly deprived. In order to
eat, he squanders this one asset by becoming a forger of art, specializing
in minor works by Utrillo. He is rescued by the love of a beautiful and
wealthy woman, and it is the failure of this relationship and the outbreak
of war that propel him into the world of espionage.
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The Unknown Shore
(1959, 1996)
Follows the adventures of two young seamen who are
shipwrecked along the coast of Chile in 1740 and are driven to drink and
mutiny by a ruthless captain.
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The Golden Ocean
(1956, 1996)
In the mid-eighteenth century, Peter Palafox, the
son of a poor Irish parson, signs on a ship as a midshipman, just in time
for Commodore Anson's epic circumnavigation of the world
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The Road to Samarcand:
An Advenutre
(1954, 2008)
This story begins where Patrick O'Brian's devoted
fans would want it to, with a sloop in the South China Sea barely
surviving a killer typhoon. The time is the 1930s and the protagonist a
teenaged American boy whose missionary parents have just died. In the
company of his rough seafaring uncle and an elderly English cousin, an
eminent archaeologist, Derrick sets off in search of ancient treasures in
central Asia.
Along the way they encounter a charismatic Chinese bandit and a host of
bad characters, including Russian agents fomenting unrest. The narrative
touches on surprising subjects: astronomy, oriental philosophy, the
correct identification of ancient Han bronzes, and some very local
cuisine. It ends in an ice-bound valley, with the party caught between
hostile Red-Hat monks and the Great Silent Ones, the Tibetan designation
for the yeti.
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The Catalans
(1953, 2007)
This novel is a powerful successor to Testimonies,
Patrick O'Brian's first novel written for adults. It is set in that corner
of France that became O'Brian's adopted home, where the long, dark wall of
the Pyrenees runs headlong to meet the Mediterranean. Alain Roig returns
to Saint-Féliu after years in the East and finds his family in crisis. His
dour, middle-aged cousin Xavier, the mayor and most powerful citizen of
the town, has fallen in love and plans to marry Madeleine, the young
daughter of the local grocer. The Roig family property is threatened by
this union, and Madeleine's relatives object on different grounds.
Xavier is a tragic figure, damned by what he perceives as a lack of
feeling; Madeleine is to be his salvation. Unfortunately she does not
return his affection, and, as the feasts and harvest festivals of Saint-Féliu
are played out, she finds herself falling in love with Alain.
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Aka The Frozen Flame
(United Kingdom)
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Testimonies:
A Novel
(1952, 1995)
O'Brian's greatness is present. Calmly and with wit he shows how
things go wrong in little worlds.
Aka Three Bear Witness
(United Kingdom)
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Hussein: An Entertainment
(1938, 2001)
A glittering adventure set in India at the height of
the British Raj. The New York Times compared this book to Kipling's
Kim and called it "a gorgeous entertainment." Of this early work,
published when he was in his early twenties, Patrick O'Brian writes in a
foreword: "In the writing of the book I learnt the rudiments of my
calling: but more than that, it opened a well of joy that has not yet run
dry." The story is about a young mahout—or elephant handler—his childhood
and life in India, and his relationship and adventures with elephants. As
a boy, Hussein falls in love with a beautiful and elusive girl, Sashiya,
and arranges for another of her suitors to be murdered with a fakir's
curse. The dead man's relatives vow vengeance. Hussein escapes and his
adventures begin: snake-charming, sword-fighting, spying, stealing a
fortune, and returning triumphantly to claim his bride. All of this is set
against an evocatively exotic India, full of bazaars, temples, and
beautiful women—despite the fact that O'Brian had never been to the East
when he wrote the story.
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Caesar
(1930)
The life-story of a Panda-Leopard.
Joseph Banks: A Life
(1987, 1989)
One of our greatest writers about the sea has
written an engrossing story of one of history's most legendary maritime
explorers. O'Brian's biography of naturalist, explorer, and cofounder of
Australia, Joseph Banks, is narrative history at its finest. It reveals
Banks to be a man of enduring importance, and establishes itself as a
classic of exploration. -
Picasso
(1976)
Aka Pablo Ruiz Picasso.
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Men-of-War: Life in Nelson's Navy (1974)
The author of the acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin
historical sea novels presents a concise, profusely illustrated
description of daily life in Nelson's navy, including anecdotes about the
battles and commanders that established Britain's naval supremacy.
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