Caesar - Hardcover

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Patrick O’Brian, until his death in 2000, was one of our greatest contemporary novelists. He is the author of the acclaimed Aubrey–Maturin tales and the biographer of Joseph Banks and Picasso. He is the author of many other books including Testimonies, and his Collected Short Stories. In 1995 he was the first recipient of the Heywood Hill Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to literature. In the same year he was awarded the CBE. In 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He lived for many years in South West France and he died in Dublin in January 2000.

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'Caesar' was Patrick O'Brian's first novel. At the age of fourteen, suffering from chronic ill health, he sets about creating his first fictional character. 'I did it mostly in my bedroom, and a little when I should have been doing homework,' he confessed in a note on his first dust-jacket. It tells the picaresque and enchanting, if bloodthirsty, story of Caesar – whose father was a giant panda and whose mother was a snow leopard. It tells of his life as a cub, his first exploits hunting, his first encounters with man, his capture and taming.
'Caesar: The Life of a Panda Leopard' was published in March 1930, three months after his fifteenth birthday, but the dry wit and unsentimental precision O'Brian's readers savour is already in evidence. Caesar furiously mauls two shepherds, then suddenly laments, with utter sangfroid, 'I dimly felt sorry that I had needlessly killed these two useless things, for though I was hungry I could not bring myself to eat these smelly men.' 'Caesar' combines Stephen Maturin's dry wit and encyclopaedic knowledge of natural history with all the sanguinary charm of the 'Jungle Book'. It was an instant success: translations appeared in Sweden, Denmark and Japan and O'Brien was hailed as the 'boy-Thoreau'.

A delightful book, 'Caesar' bears the unmistakable signs of O'Brian's genius for story-telling; all admirers of his writing will be enthralled.

'We can see here a true storyteller in the making. There is the sheer zest of setting down a gripping narrative, which holds the reader's attention and never flags, and an endless fertility of invention. Never did heroes, human or animal, lead more eventful lives.
JULIET TOWNESEND, 'Literary Review'