Aubrey-Maturin

Patrick O'Brian's twenty completed novels follow Jack Aubrey, an officer of the Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon who is also a naturalist and an intelligence agent, through the long wars against Napoleonic France. The books are as much about the friendship between the two men as about the fighting, and O'Brian writes the period from the inside: the seamanship, the medicine and the language of the day are left largely unexplained, on the assumption that the reader will keep up. Beginning with Master and Commander in 1969 and ending with Blue at the Mizzen in 1999, the sequence is often described as one very long novel rather than twenty separate ones, and rewards being read in order.