As 'The Thirteen-Gun Salute' opens Jack Aubrey has been reinstated to his command, and he and his old friend Dr Maturin are sailing on a secret mission with a hand-picked crew, most of them shipmates from the adventures and lucrative voyages of earlier years. But Patrick O’Brian’s resourcefulness is a sure warrant that things will not turn out as his readers or characters expect. Twists and turns, sub-plots, echoes from the past, these are the only certainties in this astonishing novel. Distant waters, exotic scenes, flora and fauna to satisfy Maturin’s innocent curiosity as well as scope for his cloak and dagger work enrich ts flow. The ending leaves the reader more than usually impatient for its successor.

“… Robert Hardy has a consummate knack of giving timbre and atmosphere to everything he reads.”
TIME OUT

Reviews

‘The century’s finest sea stories’
Daily Mail

‘As entertaining as its predecessors. O’Brian is a master of the narrative of action, but he has sustained interest through this long sequence of novels by expanding the genre to which they belong so that it can include much else besides.’
Peter Campbell, London Review of Books