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.
"I haven’t read novels [in the past ten years] except for all of
the Patrick O’Brian series. It was, unfortunately, like tripping on
heroin. I started on those books and couldn’t stop."
*E. O. Wilson - Boston Globe*
"Addictively readable."
*Chicago Tribune*
"They're funny, they're exciting, they're informative. . . there
are legions of us who gladly ship out time and time again under
Captain Aubrey."
*The New Yorker*
"lf Jane Austen had written rousing sea yarns, she would have
produced something very close to the prose of Patrick O'Brian."
*Time*
"The best historical novels ever written… On every page Mr. O’Brian
reminds us with subtle artistry of the most important of all
historical lessons: that times change but people don’t, that the
griefs and follies and victories of the men and women who were here
before us are in fact the maps of our own lives."
*Richard Snow - New York Times Book Review*
"It has been something of a shock to find myself—an inveterate
reader of girl books—obsessed with Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic-era
historical novels… What keeps me hooked are the evolving
relationships between Jack and Stephen and the women they
love."
*Tamar Lewin - New York Times*
"I devoured Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume masterpiece as if it had
been so many tots of Jamaica grog."
*Christopher Hitchens - Slate*
"I fell in love with his writing straightaway, at first with Master
and Commander. It wasn’t primarily the Nelson and Napoleonic
period, more the human relationships. …And of course having
characters isolated in the middle of the goddamn sea gives more
scope. …It’s about friendship, camaraderie. Jack Aubrey and Stephen
Maturin always remind me a bit of Mick and me."
*Keith Richards*
"[O’Brian’s] Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in
the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of
today’s putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived
Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade."
*David Mamet - New York Times*
"The Aubrey-Maturin series… far beyond any episodic chronicle, ebbs
and flows with the timeless tide of character and the human
heart."
*Ken Ringle - Washington Post*
"O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin volumes actually constitute a single
6,443-page novel, one that should have been on those lists of the
greatest novels of the 20th century."
*George Will*
"Gripping and vivid… a whole, solidly living world for the
imagination to inhabit."
*A. S. Byatt*
"There is not a writer alive whose work I value over his."
*Stephen Becker - Chicago Sun-Times*
"Patrick O’Brian is unquestionably the Homer of the Napoleonic
wars."
*James Hamilton-Paterson - New Republic*
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