The Letter of Marque

Skip to the beginning of the images gallery

SKU

FIC6125

£9.99

FREE Delivery to UK - Spend over £75
FREE Delivery to Europe - Spend over £150
Worldwide Delivery Available

Overview

Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written.

View full description

Product Details

Part Number: FIC6125

Edition: 2010

Printed and corrected to: No

ISBN: 9780006499275

Publisher: Harper Collins

Author(s): Patrick O'Brian

Author: No

Format: Paperback

Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of their beginning, with Master and Commander, these evocative stories are being re-issued in paperback with smart new livery. This is the twelfth book in the series.

Jack 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 familar 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.

About Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O’Brian, one of our greatest contemporary novelists, is the author of the acclaimed Aubrey–Maturin tales and the biographer of Joseph Banks and Picasso. His first novel, ‘Testimonies’, and his ‘Collected Short Stories’ have recently been republished by HarperCollins. He has translated many works from French into English, among them the novels and memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and the first volume of Jean Lacouture’s biography of Charles de Gaulle. In 1995 he was the first recipient of the Heywood Hill Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to literature. In the same year he was also awarded the CBE. In 1997 he was given an honorary doctorate of letters by Trinity College, Dublin. Patrick O’Brian lived for many years in south west France, and died in Dublin in January 2000.

Patrick O’Brian is best known for the Aubrey–Maturin series, acclaimed by Richard Snow in ‘The New York Times’ as ‘the best historical novels ever written’.