MASTER & COMMANDER

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick OBrians now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels and establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ships surgeon and an intelligence agent. ;i;Master and Commander;/i; contains all the action and excitement of a great historical novel. But it alo displays the qualities which have put OBrian so far ahead of any of his competitors, including 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. OBrians portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute.