The Surgeon's Mate

by Patrick O'Brian

Overview

"It has been said that this series is some of the finest historical fiction of our time....Aubrey and Maturin have been described as better than Holmes and Watson, the equal of Quixote and Panza....All this is true. And the marvel is, it hardly says enough."—John Balzar, Los Angeles Times

British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, with his great love, Diana Villiers, speed home to England with news of their latest victory over the Americans. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the trio run into trouble when they attract the menacing attention of two American privateers. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks—and the highs and lows of the love affair between Maturin and Villiers—is as tense, stirring, and unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O’Brian has written in his epic series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393541649
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Series:	Aubrey-Maturin Series , #7
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	75,807
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Date of Birth:

December 12, 1914

Date of Death:

January 2, 2000

Place of Birth:

Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire

Place of Death:

Dublin, Ireland

Education:

Shebbear College, Devon

Website:

http://www.wwnorton.com/pob/pobhome.htm

What People are Saying About This

Keith Richards

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.

George Garrett

The high seas are his home place—as they were for Melville and Conrad. And his time, the age and era of the great Nelson, is the altogether gracefully resurrected past, in large and small and always in a wealth of shining details. But Patrick O'Brian is a novelist for here and now, someone who shares his splendid vision, his wonderful sense of character, with a growing number of lucky contemporary readers who have found his works.

A. S. Byatt

Gripping and vivid… a whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit.

George Will

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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 - Charles McGrath

"It has been something of a shock to find myself . . . 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

O'Brian's superb series on the early-19th-century adventures of Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy officer, and his friend Stephen Maturin, Navy surgeon and naturalist, continues with a look at the darker side of Maturin's life: his work in British intelligence. Aubrey, Maturin and Diana Villiers (Maturin's fickle and enigmatic love) are passengers on a packet ship from Nova Scotia to England when two American privateers give chase. They are hunting Maturin, who has compromised U.S. spy networks. The Americans are eluded, and upon reaching England, Maturin sets off to France. Armed with safe conduct papers, he lectures on natural history and installs Villiers in Paris. Suspicious French agents try to bait Maturin but he refuses to be lured into an indiscretion. On his return to London, Maturin is sent to woo Catalan officers and troops from the French cause to the British. Aubrey provides transport, but despite his best support, including staging a splendid charade chase on the water, the mission takes a nasty turn when their ship founders; seized by the French, Maturin and Aubrey are hauled off to Paris's infamous Temple Prison. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly