Aubrey-Maturin · Book 3
HMS Surprise
- Published
- 1 January 1973
- Pages
- 359
- ISBN-13
- 9780007255856
- Type
- novel
About this book
"HMS Surprise" (1973, 359 pages) is the third entry in Patrick O'Brian's sequence, sitting between "Post Captain" and "The Mauritius Command" in a series prized less for episodic war-adventure than for its sustained character study of Jack Aubrey's appetite and courage against Stephen Maturin's melancholy intellect.
Its place in Aubrey-Maturin
HMS Surprise is book 3 in the Aubrey-Maturin series. It follows Post Captain. It is followed by The Mauritius Command. See the full Aubrey-Maturin reading order.
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels follow the friendship of Jack Aubrey, a bluff, brilliant, and perpetually broke Royal Navy officer, and Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon who is also a naturalist and, unbeknownst to most of the crew, a British intelligence agent. The two meet as strangers at a concert in Menorca in 1800 — nearly duelling before becoming friends — and the twenty novels that follow chart Jack's rise through the Napoleonic-era Navy and Stephen's parallel career gathering intelligence across…
Editions
- edition · unknown publisher · — · ISBN 9780007255856
- edition · unknown publisher · — · ISBN 9780393088465
- edition · unknown publisher · — · ISBN 9780006499176