Aubrey–Maturin series

Patrick O'Brian's masterpiece, the Aubrey-Maturin series, follows the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R. N., and Dr. Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. The series consists of 20 complete and one unfinished novel, the first published in 1970 and the last finished novel in 1999. The 21st novel of the series, left unfinished by O'Brian's death in 2000, appeared in print in late 2004.

The series received considerable international acclaim and most of the novels reached the The New York Times Best Seller list. These novels comprised the canon of an author often compared to Jane Austen, C. S. Forester and a myriad of other British authors central to the canon.

Details of a life aboard a man-of-war are faultless 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. The Oscar-nominated 2003 film Master and The Far Side of the World is based upon these books.

1. Master and Commander (1990) ISBN 978-0-393-30705-4 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 are faultless 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.

2. Post Captain (1990) ISBN 978-0-393-30706-1 "We've beat them before and we'll beat them again. " 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.

3. HMS Surprise (1991) ISBN 978-0-393-30761-0 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 the ships sent by Napoleon to attack the China Fleet.

4. The Mauritius Command (1991) ISBN 978-0-393-30762-7 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 of Mauritius and La Réunion. But the difficulties of carrying out his orders are compounded by two of his own captains-Lord Clonfert, a pleasure-seeking dilettante, and Captain Corbett, whose severity pushes his crew to the verge of mutiny.

5. Desolation Island (1991) ISBN 978-0-393-30812-9 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...

6. The Fortune of War (1991) ISBN 978-0-393-30813-6 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.

7. The Surgeon's Mate (1992) ISBN 978-0-393-30820-4 Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by dispatch 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 attention of two privateers soon becomes menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination, as anything Patrick O'Brian has written.

8. The Ionian Mission (1992) ISBN 978-0-393-30821-1 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...