Author Information
Patrick O'Brian's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    42 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1952
  • Latest Book:
    November 2023
  • Author Rating:
  • Share:
About the Author

Patrick O'Brian is the author of the acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin tales and the biographer of Joseph Banks and Picasso. He 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 lierature. In the same year he was awarded the CBE. In 1997 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Trinity College, Dublin. He died on 2 January 2000 at the age of 85.

Full Series List in Order

Aubrey/Maturin

1 - Master and Commander (1970)
2 - Post Captain (1972)
3 - H.M.S. Surprise (Jan-1973)
4 - The Mauritius Command (Jan-1977)
5 - Desolation Island (1978)
6 - The Fortune of War (1979)
7 - The Surgeon's Mate (1980)
8 - The Ionian Mission (Jan-1981)
9 - Treason's Harbor (1983)
10 - The Far Side of the World (1984)
11 - The Reverse of the Medal (1986)
12 - The Letter of Marque (1988)
13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute (Jan-1989)
14 - The Nutmeg of Consolation (Aug-1991)
15 - The Truelove (May-1992)
16 - The Wine-Dark Sea (Oct-1993)
17 - The Commodore (Apr-1996)
18 - The Yellow Admiral (Oct-1996)
19 - The Hundred Days (Sep-1998)
20 - Blue at the Mizzen (Nov-1999)
21 - The Final, Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (Oct-2004)

Book List in Order: 42 titles



  • Joseph Pugh, sick of Oxford and of teaching, decides to take some time off to live in a wild and beautiful Welsh farm valley. There he falls physically ill and is nursed back to health by Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of a neighboring farmer. Slowly, unwi...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    Commodore (later Admiral) Anson's fateful circumnavigation of the globe in 1740 is the background to The Golden Ocean, Patrick O'Brian's first historical sea novel. Peter Palafox, son of a poor Irish parson, signs on as a midshipman, never before hav...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R. N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of life...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    "We've beat them before and we'll beat them again." In 1803 Napoleon smashes the Peace of Amiens, and Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., taking refuge in France from his creditors, is interned. He escapes from France, from debtors' prison, from a possible m...



  • Third in the series of Aubrey-Maturin adventures, this book is set among the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East India Company. Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and...



  • Captain Jack Aubrey is ashore on half pay without a command--until Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders for Aubrey to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant, there to mount an expedition against the French-held isla...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon Stephen Maturin sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy--and a treacherous disease th...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., arrives in the Dutch East Indies to find himself appointed to the command of the fastest and best-armed frigate in the Navy. He and his friend Stephen Maturin take passage for England in a dispatch vessel. But the War of 18...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by dispatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the att...






  • Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans now of many battles, return in this novel to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But Jack is now a senior captain commanding a line-of-battle ship in the Royal Navy's blockade of Toulon, and this i...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    All of Patrick O'Brian's strengths are on parade in this novel of action and intrigue, set partly in Malta, partly in the treacherous, pirate-infested waters of the Red Sea. While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assu...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    It is still the War of 1812. Patrick O'Brian takes his hero Jack Aubrey and his tetchy, sardonic friend Stephen Maturin on a voyage as fascinating as anything he has ever written. They set course across the South Atlantic to intercept a powerful Amer...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., ashore after a successful cruise, is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make certain investments in the City. This innocent decision ensnares him in the London criminal underground and in government espionage--the provin...



    • / Action Adventure
    • Buy Buy

    Captain Jack Aubrey, a brilliant and experienced officer, has been struck off the list of post-captains for a crime he did not commit. His old friend Stephen Maturin, usually cast as a ship's surgeon to mask his discreet activities on behalf of Briti...



  • Captain Jack Aubrey sets sail for the South China Sea, shepherding a diplomatic mission to prevent links between Bonaparte and the Malay princes. Stephen Maturin climbs the Thousand Steps of the sacred crater of the orangutans; a killer typhoon catch...



  • Shipwrecked on a remote island, Captain Aubrey and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck, only to have their makeshift vessel burned in an attack by Malay pirates. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the ingenuity of...



  • A British whaler has been captured by an ambitious chief in the Sandwich Islands at French instigation, and Captain Aubrey is dispatched with the Surprise to restore order. But stowed away in the cable-tier is an escaped female convict. To the office...



  • At the outset of this adventure, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin pursue a heavy American privateer through the Great South Sea. Their ship, the Surprise, is now also a privateer, the better to escape diplomatic complications from Stephen's mission, w...







  • A collection of startlingly vivid short stories from Patrick O'Brian, author of the highly acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin series.Patrick O'Brian has emerged, in the opinion of many, as one of the greatest novelists in English. His fame rests mainly on the ...



  • Inspired by the Wager disaster, The Unknown Shore is an immediate precursor to Patrick O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin series that displays all the splendid prose and attention to detail that delight O'Brian's millions of fans. Patrick O...



  • Having survived their adventure in the Great South Sea, Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin now return to England. For Jack it is a happy homecoming, but for Stephen disastrous: his little daughter appears to be autistic, incapable of speech or c...



  • Life ashore may once again be the undoing of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy, in Patrick O'Brian's long-awaited sequel to his bestseller The Commodore. It is 1814; with the coming of peace and for several other reasons his future at the admiral...



  • Napoleon, escaped from Elba, pursues his enemies across Europe like a vengeful phoenix. If he can corner the British and Prussians before their Russian and Austrian allies arrive, his genius will lead the French armies to triumph at Waterloo. In the...



  • Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. Now, for the first time, they are available in electronic book format, so a whole new generation of readers can be swept away ...



  • Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her w...



  • "O'Brian was only 15 when [Caesar] was published, but he already possessed an instinct for deft plotting and uncomplicated narrative." -- The New York Times A stark tale encompassing the cruelty and beauty of the natural world, and a clear demonstrat...



  • A glittering adventure set in India at the height of the British Raj. The New York Times compared this book to Kipling's Kim and called it "a gorgeous entertainment." Of this early work, published when he was in his early twenties, Patrick O'Brian wr...



  • Gas is poured. A match is lit. Another church crumbles to the ground in a heap of ashes and embers. With plans to retire in the near future, Fire Marshal Rich Goeller is drawn into one final case that will define his legacy as an arson investigator. ...






  • Firefighter Paul Clouse is the prime suspect when his wife of six years is brutally murdered on Halloween night.Working to restore the historic West Baden Springs Hotel, Clouse soon learns his friends and the hotel are targeted by a murderer disguise...



  • After the untimely death of his father, Mike Sheridan learns to live again. A city firefighter working near Chicago, Sheridan enters a particularly perilous summer where everything is not as it seems. His nephew is baptized into the fire department, ...




  • To the delight of millions of Patrick O'Brian fans, here is the final, partial installment of the Aubrey-Maturin series, for the first time in paperback.Blue at the Mizzen (novel #20) ended with Jack Aubrey getting the news, in Chile, of his elevatio...



  • A dark story of love and betrayal set against the brilliant colors of the Catalan country in southern France. This novel, long out of print, is a powerful successor to Testimonies, Patrick O'Brian's first novel written for adults. It is set in tha...



  • The protagonist of this World War II novel is a prisoner of the German army in France. In order to keep himself sane while denying the charges and absorbing the beatings of his captors, Richard Temple conducts a minute examination -- one might almost...



  • An archaeological expedition with a cargo of priceless jade is pursued across the Gobi Desert into the snows of Tibet. This story begins where Patrick O'Brian's devoted fans would want it to, with a sloop in the South China Sea barely surviving a ...















    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    A scholarly, passionate and brilliantly-written biography of Pablo Picasso by Patrick O'Brian, the famous author of the much-loved Aubrey-Maturin series, reissued in a stunning new cover. Patrick O'Brian's outstanding biography of Picasso explores co...


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Patrick O'Brian has published 42 books.

Patrick O'Brian does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Men-of-War, was published in November 2023.

The first book by Patrick O'Brian, Testimonies, was published in January 1952.

Yes. Patrick O'Brian has 1 series.