John Bowen
The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O'Brian (IliarperCollins, £14.99) is the 16th of his sequence of novels, set during the Napoleonic Wars, about James Aubrey RN and his friend and surgeon, Stephen Maturin. New readers should start with the first, Master and Commander. The whole story is told with such zest — battles and everyday shipboard routine, politics and Personal relationships, natural history, medicine, landscapes and seascapes, tem- pest and calm from the Antarctic to the North Atlantic, all with a grasp of the col- loquial speech and attitudes of the period which an Ackroyd might envy. Forget your Booker short list: this is professional writing. I also found much pleasure in the deftness and delicacy of Richard Eyre's memoir, Utopia and Other Places (Blooms- bury, £14,99). Lastly I commend Tommy was Here by Simon Corrigan (Deutsch, £12.99) which turned up among the entries for the Betty Trask Prize — again a profes- sional touch with narrative and character.
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