The Uncertain Land and Other Poems: A Significant Literary Work of Napoleonic Naval History and Personal Discovery

The first ever collection of poems by the acclaimed author of the Aubrey/Maturin series of Napoleonic naval adventures.

As we have stood with Jack and Stephen on the deck of the Surprise and other ships, readers around the world have been transported to a place and time at once familiar and exotic, routine and dramatic.

At all times, Patrick O’Brian’s deep knowledge of the period and profound empathy with the landscape of the sea has ensured there is always a firm hand on the tiller. The writer’s command of language is combined with the poet’s eye for visual detail to remarkable, and unforgettable effect.

In The Uncertain Land and Other Poems, those same strengths are vividly displayed as O’Brian leads us on a journey through his own life. Here, we see a writer full of a young man’s spirit, challenging life, and here an author reflecting an old man’s melancholy at youth gone; in between, as he describes the places that he lived and people that he encountered, are poems of sly observation, wry humour and delicate beauty.

Through more than 100 poems, O’Brian reveals insights into the world that captivated him while he was at work on a succession of novels that would reach its apotheosis in the Aubrey/Maturin adventures, which would secure his reputation as ‘the Homer of the Napoleonic Wars’. Intensely personal, allusive and unique, this is the work of a lifetime, published now for the very first time.

Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel long Aubrey–Maturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.

Nikolai Tolstoy is an English-Russian author and Patrick O’Brian’s step-son, their relationship spanned forty-five years during O’Brian’s marriage to Mary Tolstoy, NIkolai’s mother.

He has written a number of books, including Patrick O’Brian – The Making of a Novelist, The Coming of the King and Victims of Yalta. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979.