Collected Short Stories - Softcover

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Patrick O’Brian 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 lived for many years in south west France and he died in Dublin in January 2000.

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Patrick O’Brian has emerged, in the opinion of many, as the greatest historical novelist now writing in English. He is best known for the astonishing 'roman fleuve' of the Aubrey/Maturin tales, but it is often forgotten that he first made his reputation as a writer of short stories.

Collected here for the first time is a definitive selection of all the stories O’Brian wishes to preserve. They exhibit an effortless variety of mood and tone: some stories are enchantingly funny, others exciting, terrifying or passionate. And as O’Brian’s admirers know, his prose is always fresh and meticulous, his sympathy with frivolity, passion and suffering, unfailing.

“A Kafka in the countryside … O’Brian’s accounts of travelling have the clarity of the best descriptive writing … The astonishing achievement of these short stories is not just the author’s truth to the landscape, but his pitiless vision of the disintegration of personality when a living creature is struggling in a hostile world.”
ANTHONY EVERITT, 'Country Life'

“Young writers ought, before lurching into print, to be obliged to learn by heart at least one of Patrick O’Brian’s short stories … O’Brian writes like a man to whom writing comes as easily as breathing: precisely, fluently, economically … perfect cadences.”
JANE SHILLING, 'Sunday Telegraph'

“He is more than a merely popular writer. He is a very, very fine one.”
CHARLTON HESTON, 'Daily Telegraph'