"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."
"I devoured Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume masterpiece as if it had been so many tots of Jamaica grog."
Slate - Christopher Hitchens
"Patrick O’Brian is unquestionably the Homer of the Napoleonic wars."
New Republic - James Hamilton-Paterson
"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."
New York Times Book Review - Richard Snow
"The Aubrey-Maturin series… far beyond any episodic chronicle, ebbs and flows with the timeless tide of character and the human heart."
"[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."
New York Times - David Mamet
"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."
"Gripping and vivid… a whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit."
"There is not a writer alive whose work I value over his."
Chicago Sun-Times - Stephen Becker
"A world of enchanting fictional surfaces."
New York Review of Books - John Bayley
"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."
New York Times - Tamar Lewin
"These eccentric, improbably novels seem to have been written by Patrick O'Brian to please himself in the first instance, and thereafter to please those readers who may share his delight in precision of language, odd lands and colors, a humane respect for such old-fashioned sentiments as friendship and honor. Like Aubrey and Maturin playing Mozart duets beneath a Pacific moon, he works elegant variations on the tradition of the seafaring adventure story."
"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."
Boston Globe - Edward O. Wilson
The narrative and the narrator are as well matched in this series of British seafaring adventures as Captain Aubrey and his “small, elderly, but sweet sailing frigate, SURPRISE” This book features intrigues of Napoleonic espionage in the Mediterranean and Red Seas.Tull’s vocal virtuosity has a widely disparate group of O’Brian’s salty characters upon which to work, from the powerful, but endearing, Captain Aubrey, to the quiet, scientific landlubber, Dr. Maturin. Hearing the vernacular of the early nineteeth-century English navy, complete with the clipped tones of the stuffy upper-class officers and the heavily accented slang of the lowly seaman, the listener feels he’s right on board ship. Occasionally, though, the heaviness of the accents and speed of delivery border on the unintelligible. The collaboration of the two Patricks in this series is producing brilliant results. J.D.N. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine
