The Hundred Days

For Jack Aubrey, the Hundred Days was an 11th-hour rescue of a lifetime's service in the Royal Navy that, for all its brilliance and excitement, seemed to be ending in inconspicuous respectability. He was already on his way across the Atlantic to try his fortunes under the flag of the young Chilean republic when Napoleon escaped from Elba.Appointed to command a squadron flying the broad pennant of a Commodore, he was flag officer in all but name. Like Somerville's Force H in 1940, he was to operate within and without the Mediterranean on a number of difficult and dangerous missions in an atmosphere of confused political allegiances with whatever ships could be scraped together at a moment's notice. Jack is supported, as always, by the subtle intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge of his old friend Stephen Maturin. Both of them are aging. Jack wheezes as he hauls himself aloft and Stephen, physically as indomitable as ever, is numbed by the death of his wife, Diana, killed in an accident brought about, characteristically, by her own reckless driving. To immerse himself once more in plots and counterplots to defeat Napoleon is welcome relief.

Conspiracy in the Adriatic, in the Berber and Arab lands of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, night actions, fierce pursuits, the natural wonders of a still uncolonised North Africa exert their pull on him as they will on the reader of this, the 19th novel in a series that has, like the service it depicts, carried all before it.