This special hardback edition celebrates the 50th anniversary of first publication with a brand-new foreword by O''Brian''s stepson and biographer, Nikolai Tolstoy, and artist''s note by Geoff Hunt, and includes the complete text of the previously unavailable Men-of-War, O''Brian''s fascinating guide to the world of Aubrey/Maturin. Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O''Brian''s now famous Aubrey/Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship''s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It contains all the action and excitement which could possibly be hoped for in a historical novel, but it also displays the qualities which have put O''Brian far ahead of any of his competitors: his depiction of the detail of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience, of the landscape and of the sea. O''Brian''s portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute. His power of characterisation is above all masterly. This brilliant historical novel marked the debut of a writer who has grown into one of the most remarkable literary novelists now writing, the author of what Alan Judd, writing in the Sunday Times, has described as ''the most significant extended story since Anthony Powell''s A Dance to the Music of Time ''.

Autorentext

Patrick O'Brian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel long AubreyMaturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.