Desolation Island (Aubrey/Maturin Novels, 5)

Review
"Good history…espionage, romance…and an action at sea that for sheer descriptive power can match anything in sea-fiction."
― Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian
"I have been enthralled since reading Master and Commander. Now, having just finished Desolation Island, I find myself curiously anxious to slow down. True, [more] volumes await me, but what I have read is so rich and splendid that I need to ponder and digest."
― Robert Massie
"The relationship [between Aubrey and Maturin]...is about the best thing afloat....For Conradian power of description and sheer excitement there is nothing in naval fiction to beat the stern chase as the outgunned Leopard staggers through mountain waves in icy latitudes to escape the Dutch seventy-four." ―Stephen Vaughan, Observer
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 that decimates the crew. With a Dutch man-of-war to windward, the undermanned, outgunned Leopard sails for her life into the freezing waters of the Antarctic, where, in mountain seas, the Dutchman closes.
From the Back Cover
Praise for the Aubrey/Maturin Series and Patrick O’Brian
“The best historical novels ever written.”
― Richard Snow, New York Times Book Review
“I love these books.… [They offer] the same sense of lived experience as Hilary Mantel.… They will sweep you away and return you delighted, increased and stunned. If the phrase ‘Napoleonic war fiction’ fills you with anticipation, then you don’t need me to convince you to read [Patrick] O’Brian. But for the rest of you.… [P]lease, just trust me.”
― Nicola Griffith, NPR
“A few books work their way… onto [bestseller] lists by genuine, lasting excellence―witness The Lord of the Rings, or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Like John LeCarré, [O’Brian] has erased the boundary separating a debased genre from ‘serious’ fiction. O’Brian is a novelist, pure and simple, one of the best we have.”
― Mark Horowitz, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Patrick O’Brian has] the power of bringing near to the reader… savagery and tenderness, beauty and mystery and boldness and dignity.”
― Eudora Welty
“O’Brian’s eloquent admirers include not merely distinguished critics and reviewers but… thousands upon thousands of fervent readers who thank the gods for him.… [H]is work accomplishes nobly the three grand purposes of art: to entertain, to edify, and to awe.”
― Stephen Becker, Paris Review
“For escapist reading, I especially like the sea novels of Patrick O’Brian.”
― Bill Bryson
“O’Brian’s narrative… provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises―comic, grim, farcical and tragic. An essential of the truly gripping book for the narrative addict is the creation of a whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit, and O’Brian does this with prodigal specificity and generosity.”
― A. S. Byatt
“I prefer the Aubrey-Maturin series to all others.… Every book is packed to absolute straining with erudition, wit, history, and thunderous action.”
― Joe Hill
“All of the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian [is on my shelves].”
― Mindy Kaling, New York Times