Patrick O’Brian wrote the Aubrey-Maturin novels, twenty completed books and one unfinished, about a Royal Navy captain and his ship’s surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars. Richard Snow, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1991, called them “the best historical novels ever written”, and that verdict has followed the series ever since. This guide covers every O’Brian book in order, the life behind the pen name, and the best places to start.
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If you only want the sequence of the naval novels, go straight to the Aubrey-Maturin reading order. This page is the wider view: the full bibliography, including the juvenile books he published under his birth name, the standalone novels, the short stories, the biographies, the poetry and the translations.
About Patrick O’Brian
Early Life
Patrick O’Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ on December 12, 1914, in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, England. He was the eighth of nine children of Charles Russ, an English physician of German descent, and Jessie Russ (born Goddard), an Englishwoman of Irish descent. His mother died when he was four.
His childhood was isolated and short of money, and his schooling was patchy. He attended St Marylebone Grammar School in London from 1924 to 1926 and Lewes Grammar School in Sussex from 1926 to 1929. Poor health ran through these years, and a later application to the Royal Navy was rejected on health grounds.
He was writing early. His first novel was written when he was twelve and published in 1930, when he was fifteen, under the name Patrick Russ. A collection of animal stories followed in 1934 and a novel set in India in 1938.
War, a New Name, and a Second Marriage
He married Elizabeth Jones in 1936, and they had two children, a son and a daughter. Their daughter was born with spina bifida and died in 1942, aged three. By then, the marriage had broken down.
During the Second World War, he worked as a volunteer ambulance driver in London during the Blitz, which is where he met Mary Tolstoy (born Wicksteed), the separated wife of Count Dmitry Tolstoy. O’Brian later wrote that he had gone on to work in wartime intelligence. His stepson and biographer, Nikolai Tolstoy, confirms only the ambulance driving, so the extent of any intelligence work remains disputed.
Both divorces came through in 1945. He and Mary married in July 1945, and in the same month, he legally changed his surname from Russ to O’Brian. Mary remained his wife and closest companion until her death in March 1998.
Wales, Collioure, and the Writing Career
From 1946 to 1949, the O’Brians lived in Cwm Croesor, a remote valley in north Wales, on very little money. In 1949, they moved to Collioure, a Catalan town on the Mediterranean coast of southern France. It remained their home for the rest of their lives.
For two decades, he earned his living from a mix of novels, short stories, and translation. He translated more than 30 books from French into English, including Henri Charrière’s prison memoir and works by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Lacouture. Two sea novels for younger readers, published in 1956 and 1959, showed where his real gift lay.
The Aubrey-Maturin series began at the suggestion of the American publisher J. B. Lippincott, after the death of the naval novelist C.S. Forester in 1966. Master and Commander appeared in the United States in 1969 and in Britain, from Collins, in 1970.
Late Fame
For twenty years, the books were quietly popular in Britain. In America, publication stopped after the first few volumes. That changed in the early 1990s, when Starling Lawrence of W. W. Norton relaunched the series, and Richard Snow’s 1991 essay in The New York Times Book Review helped bring a wave of new readers.
Honours followed in his eighties. In 1995, he became the first winner of the Heywood Hill Literary Prize, and in the same year, he was appointed CBE for services to literature. Trinity College Dublin gave him an honorary doctorate in 1997.
The Man Behind the Name
O’Brian guarded his privacy fiercely and gave publishers almost nothing for the jacket biography. For many years, reviewers and journalists assumed he was Irish, and he did nothing to correct them. He was, in fact, English by birth and upbringing.
In 1998, the year Mary died, a BBC documentary and an article in The Daily Telegraph made his original name, family background, and first marriage public. The exposure was painful for a very private man in his eighties. Dean King’s biography, the first to document his early life in full, was published in 2000, a few months after his death.
His sea experience was also less than readers supposed. He never served in the Royal Navy, and the command of rigging, gunnery, and seamanship in the novels rests on decades of reading. That makes the achievement more remarkable, not less.
Writing Style
O’Brian writes in the idiom of the period he describes. The dialogue, the jokes, the medicine and the sailing terms belong to the early 1800s, and he rarely stops to explain them. Readers pick up the language by living in it.
The comparison critics most often reach for is to Jane Austen. The novels spend as much time on dinners, marriages, debts, and music as on battles. The humor is dry and constant.
He also built his plots on the record. Many of Jack Aubrey’s actions are adapted from real engagements, above all the career of Thomas Cochrane, and O’Brian places his characters inside real campaigns without changing how those campaigns ended. For more on how novelists handle the record, see our guide to what makes historical fiction accurate.
Patrick O’Brian Series in Reading Order
The Aubrey-Maturin Series
The series follows Jack Aubrey, a big, cheerful, hard-fighting Royal Navy officer, and Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalan physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent. They meet at a concert in Minorca in 1800, and the books follow their friendship across every ocean until after Waterloo. Read them in publication order, which is also the order of the story.
The entries below are short on purpose and avoid spoilers. For longer notes on each book, see the full Aubrey-Maturin reading order. If you already know you want all of them, The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels boxed set collects the whole series, including the unfinished final book, in five hardback volumes.
1. Master and Commander (1969)
Port Mahon, Minorca, 1800. Newly promoted Jack Aubrey gets his first command, the small sloop Sophie, and persuades a physician named Stephen Maturin to sail as her surgeon. The cruise that follows is closely based on Thomas Cochrane’s real exploits in HMS Speedy.
2. Post Captain (1972)
The Peace of Amiens puts Aubrey ashore in the English countryside, where he and Maturin court the women of a neighboring family. Then his money vanishes, his creditors close in, and the war starts again. It has more of the drawing room in it than any other book in the series.
3. H.M.S. Surprise (1973)
Aubrey takes command of the frigate that will become the heart of the series and carries a British envoy on the long voyage to the East Indies, by way of Brazil and India. Maturin’s secret work for naval intelligence grows more dangerous.
4. The Mauritius Command (1977)
Restless on shore, Aubrey is sent to Cape Town in HMS Boadicea to lead a squadron against the French islands of Mauritius and La Reunion. The novel closely follows the real Mauritius campaign of 1809 to 1811.
5. Desolation Island (1978)
Aubrey commands the aging 50-gun Leopard on a voyage to New South Wales, with convicts aboard and a suspected American spy among them for Maturin to watch. The route takes them deep into the Southern Ocean.
6. The Fortune of War (1979)
On their way home from the East Indies, Aubrey and Maturin are caught up in the new war between Britain and the United States, and much of the story unfolds in Boston. Two real frigate actions of the War of 1812 feature: Java against Constitution, and Shannon against Chesapeake.
7. The Surgeon’s Mate (1980)
From Halifax, Nova Scotia, the friends sail for England with American privateers in pursuit. Maturin is then sent on a delicate mission to a fortified island in the Baltic, with Aubrey commanding the sloop Ariel to take him there.
8. The Ionian Mission (1981)
Aubrey joins the long blockade of Toulon in HMS Worcester. He is then detached in Surprise to the Ionian coast, where he must choose an ally among rival Ottoman rulers.
9. Treason’s Harbour (1983)
In Malta, with his ship under repair, Aubrey waits for orders while Maturin discovers that the island is riddled with French agents. A mission to the Red Sea follows. Espionage drives this one more than gunnery.
10. The Far Side of the World (1984)
Surprise is ordered round Cape Horn into the Pacific to protect British whalers from the American frigate USS Norfolk. This is the principal source for the 2003 film.
11. The Reverse of the Medal (1986)
Back in England from the Pacific, Aubrey acts on a stranger’s tip about the stock market and finds himself accused of fraud. O’Brian based the plot on the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814 and the trial of Thomas Cochrane.
12. The Letter of Marque (1988)
No longer on the Navy List, Aubrey takes Surprise to sea as a private man-of-war, with a crew of volunteers and a reputation to rebuild. Maturin has urgent personal business in Sweden.
13. The Thirteen-Gun Salute (1989)
Aubrey commands HMS Diane, carrying a Foreign Office envoy to the Sultan of Pulo Prabang in the South China Sea. The aim is to win the Sultan as an ally before the French do.
14. The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991)
Shipwrecked on a remote island in the South China Sea, Aubrey and his crew must build a way off it and reach Batavia. Later the story moves to the penal colony of New South Wales.
15. The Truelove (1992)
UK title: Clarissa Oakes. Leaving Sydney, Aubrey discovers that one of his midshipmen has smuggled a young woman convict aboard Surprise. Her presence unsettles the ship as it heads into the South Pacific.
16. The Wine-Dark Sea (1993)
Surprise chases the American privateer Franklin across the South Pacific until an undersea volcano intervenes. Maturin then goes ashore in Peru on a long-delayed intelligence mission.
17. The Commodore (1994)
Aubrey is given a squadron with two tasks: to strike at the slave trade on the West African coast, then to intercept a French expedition bound for Ireland. Some sources give 1995 as the year of publication.
18. The Yellow Admiral (1996)
On blockade off Brest and in difficulties at home, Aubrey fears the coming peace. A captain promoted to flag rank without a squadron to command was called a yellow admiral, and that prospect haunts him.
19. The Hundred Days (1998)
Napoleon escaped from Elba in 1815. Aubrey’s squadron is sent into the Mediterranean and the Adriatic to cut off the ships and the money that could help him.
20. Blue at the Mizzen (1999)
After Waterloo, Surprise sails for South America, officially to chart the coast of Chile and unofficially to help the Chileans win independence from Spain. It was the last novel O’Brian completed.
21. The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (2004)
US title: 21. O’Brian left about three chapters of a twenty-first novel when he died. The published book prints the typescript alongside a facsimile of his handwritten pages, with an afterword by Richard Snow. It is for readers who have finished the other twenty.
The Anson Voyage Novels
Before Aubrey and Maturin, O’Brian wrote two sea novels for younger readers about Commodore George Anson’s voyage round the world from 1740 to 1744. They share a setting, not a cast, and can be read in either order.
1. The Golden Ocean (1956)
Peter Palafox, an Irish boy, joins Anson’s flagship Centurion and learns his trade on the way around Cape Horn. It is a single self-contained voyage and a good entry point for younger readers.
2. The Unknown Shore (1959)
Midshipman Jack Byron and his friend Tobias Barrow, a surgeon’s mate, sail in HMS Wager, the ship of Anson’s squadron that was wrecked on the coast of Chile. Reviewers have long seen the pair as prototypes for Aubrey and Maturin.
Standalone Novels and Other Books
Books Published as Patrick Russ
Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda-Leopard (1930)
His first book was written at twelve and published at fifteen. It is the life story of an imaginary animal, the cub of a giant panda and a snow leopard, from the wild to captivity.
Beasts Royal (1934)
Twelve tales of animal adventure, first published with illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe. It was reissued in 2015.
Hussein: An Entertainment (1938)
A novel set in India under the British Raj, following a young man through a string of adventures as mahout, snake charmer and storyteller. It was published by Oxford University Press when the author was 23.
Novels as Patrick O’Brian
Testimonies (1952)
UK title: Three Bear Witness. The events in a valley in north Wales, closely modelled on Cwm Croesor, are told through three testimonies: an Oxford academic, a local woman and a schoolmaster. Delmore Schwartz praised it highly in Partisan Review.
The Catalans (1953)
UK title: The Frozen Flame. Alan Roig returns to the Catalan town of Saint-Feliu in southern France to find that his cousin Xavier has fallen in love with a young woman named Madeleine, a match that meets with opposition. It is O’Brian’s novel of the country he had made his home.
The Road to Samarcand (1954)
An adventure story for younger readers set in the 1930s. Derrick, an orphaned American teenager, sets out with his uncle from the China seas on a journey across Central Asia along the old Silk Road.
Richard Temple (1962)
A British agent held by the Gestapo in occupied France looks back on his life as a painter in 1930s London. It is the last novel O’Brian published before the naval series.
Short Story Collections
The Last Pool and Other Stories (1950)
Thirteen stories, mostly of hunting, shooting and fishing, some with an uncanny edge. It was his first book of fiction under the name O’Brian.
The Walker and Other Stories (1955)
A second collection of short stories, published in the United States.
The Rendezvous and Other Stories (1994)
UK title: Collected Short Stories. The 27 stories O’Brian chose to preserve, drawn from his earlier collections. If you want one volume of his short fiction, this is the one.
Nonfiction
A Book of Voyages (1947)
An anthology of travelers’ accounts, selected and introduced by O’Brian soon after he changed his name. It attracted little attention at the time, and the first American edition did not appear until 2013.
Men-of-War: Life in Nelson’s Navy (1974)
A short illustrated introduction to life aboard Royal Navy ships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It makes a useful primer to read alongside the first few novels.
Picasso: A Biography (1976)
UK title: Pablo Ruiz Picasso. A large, comprehensive life of the painter.
Joseph Banks: A Life (1987)
A biography of the naturalist who sailed with Captain Cook in the Endeavour from 1768 to 1771 and later presided over the Royal Society for more than four decades. Banks also appears briefly in the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
Poetry
The Uncertain Land and Other Poems (2019)
The first collection of O’Brian’s poetry, published nearly twenty years after his death. It gathers more than 100 poems written across his life.
Translations
O’Brian translated more than 30 books from French. The best known is Papillon by Henri Charriere, the prison escape narrative first published in France in 1969, which appeared in his English version in 1970.
Companion Books by Other Authors
Three reference books make the naval novels easier and richer. A Sea of Words by Dean King is a lexicon of the vocabulary in the novels. Harbors and High Seas, also by King, is an atlas and geographical guide to the voyages.
Lobscouse and Spotted Dog by Anne Chotzinoff Grossman and Lisa Grossman Thomas is a cookbook of the dishes eaten in the series, with a foreword by O’Brian himself.
For the life, there are two essential books. Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed by Dean King (2000) was the first full biography. Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist by Nikolai Tolstoy (2004) is the first of two volumes by his stepson, who inherited O’Brian’s papers.
Where to Start with Patrick O’Brian
Best First Book
Start with Master and Commander. The series is one long story, and every later book assumes you know how Aubrey and Maturin met. The reading order page lists all 21 in sequence.
Expect the opening chapters to be dense. O’Brian drops you onto a ship and lets you learn as you go. The vocabulary becomes less of an obstacle the further you read.
If you finish it unsure, read Post Captain before deciding. The second novel widens the story from the quarterdeck to the shore, with courtship, debt and spying alongside the sea fights.
If You Want…
- The whole voyage in one purchase: The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels boxed set.
- The book behind the film: The Far Side of the World, though it works far better after the nine novels before it.
- A shorter sea story first: The Golden Ocean, a single volume with a young hero.
- O’Brian without ships: Testimonies, his novel of rural Wales.
- Help with the jargon: A Sea of Words beside you as you read.
- A background primer: Men-of-War: Life in Nelson’s Navy, which runs to under a hundred pages.
New to the genre as a whole? Our guide to historical fiction for beginners suggests gentler first steps.
Books by Time Period
The Napoleonic Wars (1800 to 1815)
All 21 Aubrey-Maturin books belong here. The story opens in the Mediterranean in 1800 and runs past Waterloo, taking in the War of 1812 against the United States along the way. For more fiction from the same years, on land and at sea, see our Napoleonic Wars hub.
One oddity is worth knowing. The first six novels cover about twelve years of real time, and by the end of The Fortune of War the calendar has reached June 1813. O’Brian had far more story than war left, so in his introduction to The Far Side of the World he asked readers to accept a run of hypothetical years. The next dozen books sit inside that stretched year, and the real calendar only resumes late in the series.
The Eighteenth Century
The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore are set during Anson’s circumnavigation of 1740 to 1744. Joseph Banks: A Life covers the age of scientific voyaging that followed.
The Twentieth Century
O’Brian’s adult standalone novels are set in his own century: Testimonies in a Welsh valley, The Catalans in French Catalonia, and Richard Temple in 1930s London and occupied France. The Road to Samarcand is a 1930s adventure across Asia, and Hussein is set in British India.
You can browse every era the site covers from the time periods index.
Popular Patrick O’Brian Series: Aubrey-Maturin
The Aubrey-Maturin series is the reason O’Brian is read today. On the surface it is naval adventure: chases, boarding actions, storms, prize money. Underneath it is a twenty-volume study of a friendship between two very different men.
Aubrey is energetic, gregarious and cheerful, a fine seaman who is far less sure of himself on land. Maturin is his opposite: small, quiet and learned, with a second life as an intelligence agent. They met at a concert, and their shared passion for music, with Maturin on the cello, runs through the whole series.
What sets the books apart from other naval fiction is their range. A single volume can move from a broadside to a dinner party, from natural history on a remote island to a London courtroom. O’Brian treats the whole world of the early nineteenth century as his subject, with the ship as the place he watches it from.
The novels are often described as one long story in twenty parts, and they read that way. To see how they compare with other long sequences, browse our lists of the best historical fiction series and the best historical fiction of all time. For more of the sea, go to our guide to the best naval historical fiction.
Film and Radio
There has been one feature film: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), directed by Peter Weir from a screenplay he wrote with John Collee. Russell Crowe plays Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany plays Stephen Maturin.
The film combines elements of three of the novels, and its principal source is the tenth. It also changes the enemy. In the novel, set during the War of 1812, Surprise hunts the American frigate Norfolk; in the film, set in 1805, she hunts a French privateer named Acheron.
It received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two: Best Cinematography (Russell Boyd) and Best Sound Editing (Richard King). No sequel has been produced.
On the radio, the BBC has dramatized several of the novels, beginning with Master and Commander in 1995.
Awards and Recognition
- Heywood Hill Literary Prize (1995): O’Brian was the first winner of this prize for a lifelong contribution to the enjoyment of books.
- CBE (1995): appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Birthday Honours, for services to literature.
- Honorary doctorate (1997): Doctor of Letters from Trinity College Dublin.
The film adaptation added two Academy Awards from ten nominations. His British publisher keeps a short official profile on the 4th Estate author page. W. W. Norton publishes the series in the United States, and its edition of Master and Commander still quotes Richard Snow’s line.
Legacy and Final Years
Patrick O’Brian died in Dublin on January 2, 2000, aged 85. He had spent the winter of 1998 to 1999 at Trinity College Dublin, and he was still writing about Aubrey and Maturin at the end. He is buried in Collioure beside Mary.
There will be no more books in the series. The unfinished fragment was published in 2004 as he left it. Collections of his stories and a volume of his poems have appeared since.
His reputation has kept growing. The two biographies have replaced the legend with a more complicated and more interesting man. The author whom the world took for an Irishman with salt water in his veins turned out to be an Englishman who built his navy from books.
The books remain the standard against which other Age of Sail fiction is judged. Two decades after the film, they are still the first recommendation for anyone who asks where to begin with the genre.
Similar Authors You’ll Enjoy
C.S. Forester
Forester’s Horatio Hornblower is the classic hero of Napoleonic naval fiction, and it was after Forester’s death that a publisher asked O’Brian for a sea novel. The Hornblower books follow one officer from midshipman upward. Begin with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, the first in story order, and follow our Hornblower reading order.
Alexander Kent
Alexander Kent was the pen name of Douglas Reeman, who served in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. His Richard Bolitho novels are a long, action-led sequence. The first published is To Glory We Steer (1968), and the full sequence is set out in the Bolitho reading order.
Julian Stockwin
Stockwin, a former Royal Navy officer, shows the navy from the lower deck. In Kydd (2001), a young wig-maker from Guildford is pressed into the service as a landsman. The Kydd reading order covers the long series that follows.
Dudley Pope
Pope was a naval historian before he was a novelist, and C.S. Forester encouraged him to try fiction. His Lord Ramage series runs to 18 novels, starting with Ramage (1965). Read him for a historian’s eye on the same war.
Bernard Cornwell
Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe fights the same wars on land, rising from the ranks of the British Army. Start with Sharpe’s Tiger, first in story order and set in India in 1799. Then see the Sharpe series reading order and our Bernard Cornwell guide.
Dorothy Dunnett
If what you love in O’Brian is the density, the wit and the refusal to explain, try Dunnett. Her Lymond Chronicles follow a brilliant young Scottish nobleman across sixteenth-century Europe in six novels. Begin with The Game of Kings and read our Dorothy Dunnett guide.
Further afield. For the same total immersion in an unfamiliar world, try James Clavell. Naomi Novik replays the Napoleonic Wars with dragons in the Temeraire series, and George MacDonald Fraser is the choice for readers who prize O’Brian’s humor. Our list of the best military historical fiction has more campaigns and battles.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Patrick O’Brian book to start with?
Start with Master and Commander, the first Aubrey-Maturin novel. The series tells one continuous story, and the first book shows how Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin meet. If you are still undecided afterwards, read Post Captain, the second novel, before giving up.
In what order should I read the Aubrey-Maturin novels?
Read them in publication order, from Master and Commander to Blue at the Mizzen. Publication order is also the order of the story, so there is no separate chronological order to worry about. The unfinished twenty-first book comes last and is best kept for readers who have finished the other twenty.
How many Aubrey-Maturin books are there?
There are 20 completed novels, published between 1969 and 1999, and one unfinished novel published in 2004 after O’Brian’s death. The unfinished book is called The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey in Britain and 21 in the United States.
Are The Truelove and Clarissa Oakes the same book?
Yes. The fifteenth Aubrey-Maturin novel was published in Britain as Clarissa Oakes and in the United States as The Truelove. Two of O’Brian’s earlier novels also have different titles: Testimonies is Three Bear Witness in Britain, and The Catalans is The Frozen Flame in Britain.
Are Patrick O’Brian’s books historically accurate?
They are known for their accuracy. O’Brian built many of his plots on real naval actions and campaigns, especially the career of Thomas Cochrane, and he placed his characters inside real events without changing the outcome. His one large liberty is with the calendar: after the sixth book he stretches time, fitting about a dozen novels into a few months of the real war.
What time period do Patrick O’Brian’s books cover?
The Aubrey-Maturin series runs from 1800 to late 1815, after the Battle of Waterloo, covering the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Two earlier sea novels, The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore, are set during Anson’s voyage round the world from 1740 to 1744. His other novels are set in the twentieth century.
Was Patrick O’Brian Irish?
No. He was born Richard Patrick Russ in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, England, in 1914, and changed his surname to O’Brian in 1945. For many years reviewers assumed he was Irish and he did not correct them. His real background became public in 1998 through a BBC documentary and a newspaper article.
Did Patrick O’Brian serve in the Royal Navy?
No. He never served in the Royal Navy, and an application to join was turned down on health grounds. During the Second World War he worked as a volunteer ambulance driver in London during the Blitz. His knowledge of ships and seamanship came from reading and research.
Is there a film of Patrick O’Brian’s books?
Yes. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was released in 2003, directed by Peter Weir, with Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won two, for cinematography and sound editing. The film is set in 1805 and uses a French privateer as the enemy, where the novel uses an American frigate during the War of 1812.
Are Patrick O’Brian’s books suitable for younger readers?
The Aubrey-Maturin novels are written for adults. They include battle violence, period surgery and adult relationships, and the language asks for a patient reader, so they suit confident older teenagers and up. O’Brian did write three books for younger readers: The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore.
Will there be any more Aubrey-Maturin novels?
No. Patrick O’Brian died in Dublin on January 2, 2000, leaving a twenty-first novel unfinished. The fragment was published in 2004 as it stood, and the series ends there.
What else did Patrick O’Brian write besides the Aubrey-Maturin series?
He wrote several standalone novels, including Testimonies, The Catalans and Richard Temple, as well as short stories, a volume of poems, and biographies of Pablo Picasso and Joseph Banks. He also wrote an illustrated guide to Nelson’s navy called Men-of-War and translated more than 30 books from French, including Papillon. His first three books were published under his birth name, Patrick Russ.
Do I need a companion book to read Patrick O’Brian?
No, but one can help. O’Brian does not explain his nautical terms, and readers are expected to absorb them from context. A lexicon such as A Sea of Words by Dean King answers questions quickly, and the same author’s Harbors and High Seas is an atlas of the voyages.
Conclusion
Patrick O’Brian spent the first half of his career as a little-known novelist and translator, and the second half writing one enormous story in twenty parts. The Aubrey-Maturin series is a war story, a comedy of manners, a natural history and a portrait of a friendship all at once.
Begin with Master and Commander, keep the Aubrey-Maturin reading order open, and give the opening chapters your patience. When the series runs out, the standalone novels, the biographies and The Rendezvous and Other Stories show how much more there was to him.
Related Content
- Aubrey-Maturin Reading Order
- Napoleonic Wars Historical Fiction
- Best Naval Historical Fiction
- Hornblower Reading Order
- Sharpe Series Reading Order
- Bernard Cornwell: Complete Guide
- Dorothy Dunnett: Complete Guide
- Best Military Historical Fiction
- Best Historical Fiction of All Time