Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. Now these evocative stories are being re-issued in paperback by Harper Perennial with stunning new jackets.

"The finest writer of sea-stories in the English language."--J. de Courcy Ireland

"O'Brian is one author who can put a spark of character into the sawdust of time, and The Ionian Mission is another rattling good yarn." —Stephen Vaughan, The Observer Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans now of many battles, return in this novel to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But Jack is now a senior captain commanding a line-of-battle ship in the Royal Navy's blockade of Toulon, and this is a longer, harder, colder war than the dashing frigate actions of his early days. A sudden turn of events takes him and Stephen off on a hazardous mission to the Greek Islands, where all his old skills of seamanship and his proverbial luck when fighting against odds come triumphantly into their own.

Aubrey and Maturin are caught in the outbreak of the War of 1812.

At the outset of an adventure filled with disaster and delight, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin pursue a prize through the stormy seas and icebergs south of Cape Horn, where the hunters suddenly become the hunted.

The tenth installment in the beloved, epic Aubrey/Maturin series and inspiration for the major motion picture starring Russell Crowe. The War of 1812 continues, and Captain Jack Aubrey sets course for Cape Horn on a mission after his own heart: intercepting a powerful American frigate outward bound to wreak havoc with the British whaling trade. Meanwhile, Stephen Maturin has a mission of his own in the world of secret intelligence and comes face to face with the harsh realities for women of the age. Disaster in various guises awaits them in the Great South Sea and in the far reaches of the Pacific—typhoons, castaways, shipwrecks, an ill-fated affair, murder, and criminal insanity—as well as a bold rescue by a crew of seafaring female warriors.

"The old master has us again in the palm of his hand." —Los Angeles Times Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her way to South America—where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain—the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences. The South American expedition is a desperate affair; and in the end Jack's bold initiative to strike at the vastly superior Spanish fleet precipitates a spectacular naval action that will determine both Chile's fate and his own.