[In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of The Yellow Admiral and notes that he believes O'Brian's work is finally getting the recognition it deserves.]

Tom Stoppard, Mark Knopfler, Professor John Bayley, Nicholas Soames, William Waldegrave, Charlton Heston, Michael Grade, Warren Christopher … What could possibly link such an eclectic group of people? The answer is not what but who—Patrick O'Brian, a reclusive octogenarian who has been described as “the finest novelist now writing in the English language.”

For close on thirty years, O'Brian has been quietly working away on a series of novels set in the Napoleonic wars and featuring Captain ‘Lucky Jack’ Aubrey and his friend and shipmate Stephen Maturin. The sequence opened with Master and Commander and the latest—his eighteenth—is The Yellow Admiral. Set against the backdrop of the Brest Blockade, it finds Aubrey hoping for promotion to Rear-Admiral of the Blue Squadron but worried about the prospect of demotion to Yellow Squadron, whose officers have no command and no hope of further advancement. And, of course, Aubrey's criticism of naval policy is causing intense annoyance at Westminster.

Over the years, O'Brian has acquired a growing audience of devoted fans and, in the States, his books have sold more than 1.5 million copies, each title selling an average of 1,000 books a month. Quietly. As Martin Walker wrote last year in the Guardian, he is “the best writer you've never heard of.” Now, finally, the tide is beginning to turn. Last autumn 400 enthusiasts gathered for a celebratory banquet at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, where the Band of the Royal Marines played to ambassadors, service chiefs and lesser brass who discussed O'Brian minutiae as they tucked into 18th century naval fayre—pea soup and salt beef, figgy dowdy and ship's biscuit and—inevitably—port, passed to the left. In the US, at the Newport News naval base, 700 fans queued to hear him lecture.

O'Brian himself is less than comfortable with such attention. A sickly child, he spent his early years in Ireland and was sent to prep school in Devon. Educated later by governesses and private tutors, he immersed himself in history and naval lore and dreamed of heroic adventures. The father of a young man with whom O'Brian shared a tutor had an ocean-going yacht, and young Patrick soon learned the ropes. “After a while, I could reef and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailing later on.” On land again, however, poor health returned making conventional university study impossible. Nevertheless, he spent time at Oxford and the Sorbonne.

A writer all his life, O'Brian's unpublished early work was lost when his Chelsea home was bombed in 1940. Unfit to fight, he drove an ambulance before joining the intelligence service. The War over, he and his wife Mary, mother of Nikolai Tolstoy, lived for a time in Wales but the “terrible climate” drove them to France. They have lived in the Roussillon region ever since, without recourse to English newspapers, radio or television, surrounded by vineyards and visited by children and grandchildren.

Though he has “nothing to say about the modern world,” O'Brian has written contemporary fiction as well as two linked adventure stories about Anson's voyage around the world and biographies of Picasso (once a neigbour) and Sir Joseph Banks. He is also a translator and has published editions of Colette's letters and Simone de Beauvoir. But it is for his seafaring tales that he will be for ever remembered, though he notes that “the historical novel belongs to a despised genre.” Despised or not, his own have rightly brought him recognition: a CBE and the first Heywood Hill literary prize; an internet site, numerous translations and the British Library's only “appreciation and bibliography” of a living writer. In the US, where there is an O'Brian Newsletter, Senators vie to show him around Capitol Hill. Goldwyn's studios have bought the rights to his books.

Critics have compared him to Trollope, to Proust and to Jane Austen. O'Brian, self-effacing as ever, is bemused by his increasing success. Anyone who hasn't read him has a treat in store. As Peter Hitchens of the Daily Express has written: “I envy those who have not yet discovered the wonderful books of Patrick O'Brian. They have a whole new world to discover.”