PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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. Nikolai Tolstoy is an English-Russian author and was 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 the Novelist, The Coming of the King and Victims of Yalta. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979.
'You are in for the treat of your lives. Thank God for Patrick O’Brian: his genius illuminates the literature of the English language, and lightens the lives of those who read him' Irish Times ‘O’Brian’s narrative pace is always gripping: it shifts its speed and provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises – comic, grim, farcical and tragic.… The writing is as strong and delightfully various as the people and plots. And everything – skies and seas and ports and creatures – is vivid and sensuously present.’ A. S. Byatt, Evening Standard ‘O’Brian writes like a man to whom writing comes as easily as breathing: precisely, fluently, economically… perfect cadences’ Jane Schilling, Sunday Telegraph ‘A man of poetic sensibility with a plain-teller's instinct. At best, that resounds with authority in a late Yeatsian way’ George Szirtes
