Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard

Caesar is the first book ever written by Patrick O’Brian – made available, at last, for the first time since the 1930s.

Best-known for his acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin novels, HarperCollins is delighted to announce the republication of the first two books ever written by Patrick O’Brian – who is now widely recognized as our greatest living writer. Fans of Jack Aubrey and his elusive, intriguing friend and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin just grow and grow in number.

Caesar was the first fictional being created by Patrick O’Brian and the first novel he published: he was 14 years old when he wrote it and 15 when it was published in 1930.

Caesar tells the picaresque and enchanting, if bloodthirsty, story of Caesar – whose father was a giant panda and whose mother was a snow leopard. It tells of his life as a cub, his first exploits hunting, his first encounters with man, his capture and taming.

At the age of fourteen, suffering from chronic ill health, Patrick O’Brian set about creating a fictional character: the offspring of a male giant panda and a female snow leopard. ‘I did it mostly in my bedroom, and a little when I should have been doing homework,’ he confessed in a note on his first book’s dust jacket.

Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard was finished in March 1930, three months after his fifteenth birthday, but the dry wit and unsentimental precision O’Brian’s readers savour is already in evidence. Caesar furiously mauls two shepherds, then suddenly laments, with utter sangfroid, ‘I dimly felt sorry that I had needlessly killed these two useless things, for though I was hungry I could not bring myself to eat these smelly men.’

In the autumn of 1930, the book was published in England and in the United States. Translations appeared in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Japan. O’Brian was hailed as the ‘boy-Thoreau’.

Patrick O’Brian, until his death in 2000, 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 is the author of many other books including Testimonies, and his Collected Short Stories. In 1995 he was the first recipient of the Heywood Hill Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to literature. In the same year he was awarded the CBE. In 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He lived for many years in South West France and he died in Dublin in January 2000.