In Step-by-Step Cookery Madhur Jaffrey celebrates the food not just of her native India but of southern Asia as a whole—Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. This vast area ranges in climate from temperate to tropical, even equatorial, and even Madhur Jaffrey could only hope to skim the surface and all in 270-odd pages. However, there is a theme running through these invariably well-chosen and delicious recipes, which is that of a healthy emphasis on grains. Rice and wheat, in the form of noodles, steamed buns and breads or pancakes, predominate as the staple. As the title indicates, this is also a tutorial in the cooking methods and ingredients of the East, and a very thorough and approachable one it is. Madhur Jaffrey seems to have been everywhere and eaten everything, as a good cookery writer should, and she has a vast repertoire of techniques and individual dishes at her disposal. Her explanations are clear and the many photographs ensure that everything is easily followed. The scents of chilli, garlic, ginger and soy seem to rise off the page, along with dozens of other fragrances. A few examples, to show just how tempting this collection is: Squid in Chilli and Garlic Sauce (Malaysia); Hot and Sour Prawn Soup (Thailand——"one of the world's greatest soups"); Lamb with Spring Onions (Hong Kong); Aromatic and Spicy Beef Stew (Vietnam); Pears Poached in a Saffron and Cardamom Syrup (India). —Robin Davidson

It's about time: Mac OS X for Unix Geeks arrives on the scene none too soon for UNIX aficionados who, having heard that the latest editions of Mac OS are based on a UNIX variant, want to see how the platform compares to more venerable versions of the eminently configurable operating system. This book highlights some key differences between the Darwin environment and more conventional UNIXs, enabling people with UNIX experience to take advantage of it as they learn the Mac OS X way of doing things at the command line.

This slim volume neither aims to teach its readers UNIX nor introduces them to the Mac, but rather to show how Apple has implemented UNIX. It's a fast read that assumes—as the title implies—rather a lot of UNIX knowledge. With that requirement satisfied and this book in hand, you're likely to discover aspects of Aqua much more quickly than you otherwise would have.

The authors spend lots of time explaining how administrative tasks—such as managing groups, users and passwords—are handled in the Mac OS environment. They document netinfo fully, and call attention to its limitations (such as its inability to create home directories for users) by explaining how to do the job on the command line. They also cover C programming in the Darwin universe at greater length than any other book, providing explicit instructions for such important tasks as creating header files and linking static libraries. A guide to the command line (they call the reference section "The Missing Manpages") provides good value at this book's conclusion. —David Wall, Amazon.com

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula—and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet. Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent—until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way—right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut". Then, killing time becomes its own kind of rut and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited 18 years just for the sake of waiting".

There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters' hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna are especially ideological and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle (While the audience shouts, "Down with Japanese Imperialism!" the couple holds hands and gaze dreamily into each other's eyes). When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled "To Get Rich is Glorious" after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear:

Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace.

Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the US only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable—but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. —Mary Park

In The Bridegroom, a vibrant collection of 12 stories, Ha Jin returns to Muji City, post-Cultural Revolution, where the confusions and excitements of transitions great and small spark off unpredictable consequences. These upheavals are seen through the toings and froings of everyday men and women, arrested on trumped-up charges, applying for larger apartments, waiting to see an old flame, trying to lure a husband and daughter to New York. Sharp comeuppances and the little cruelties on which the world turns—folks made fools of by fate or by other folk—emerge from writing that is deceptively unadorned, unsentimental, as forthright as his wonderfully delineated characters. What marks out these stories is Ha Jin's quiet, sly humour and an unemphatic, but compassionate sense of the absurd.

In "Alive", after a terrible earthquake, the Form New Families movement urges people to remarry, and at the dour celebration, 21 couples sing out "Even My Parents are Not as Dear as the Party and Chairman Mao". In the title story, the homely Beina has managed to carry off Baowen, the handsomest man in the sewing machine factory. And even if she is still a virgin after eight months, "I don't have to worry about those shameless bitches in our factory. He doesn't bother to give them a look. He'll never have a lifestyle problem." But his lifestyle problem is his homosexuality in the eyes of those who ensnare him: "What a wonderful husband he could have been were he not sick", muses his father-in-law.

The hopes and bewilderments of a world in which East increasingly meets West are affectionately turned into small treasures in this fine collection. Ha Jin's novel Waiting won the National Book Award in the United States (the author has lived there since leaving China in 1985) and two earlier collections of short stories also garnered impressive awards and praise. Ruth Petrie

Every saga has a beginning. Every journey has a first step...And so it is with the magical "Worlds of Chrestomanci" which English fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones began so many years ago with her own episode one—Charmed Life.

Winner of the Guardian Award for Children's Books, Charmed Life has been a favourite escape to parallel fantastical worlds since 1977, and remains refreshingly captivating and reassuringly addictive in its latest paperback edition with a wonderful new jacket illustration.

The adventure begins in a strange and not-quite contemporary England that is still peppered with paddle steamers, horse-drawn carriages and girls wearing petticoats. Orphans Eric Chant (nicknamed Cat) and his sister Gwendolen, a gifted witch, are whisked away to live in a castle with Chrestromanci, a much-revered man of magic, wealth and mysterious ways. Their new life is full of the surreal and unexpected, and there are several crazy new rules to master—not least by Gwendolen who must learn to channel her astonishing powers for good instead of mischief as she forever seems determined to do!

Chrestomanci is a truly original creation, and Charmed Life introduces this dandy nine-lived enchanter—the king of the regal dressing gown—and his associated colourful characters in a story of pace and substance, twists and turns, treachery and bravado. There's also humour amid the author's very immediate writing, and enough puzzles and mystery to keep an inquisitive mind captivated until the very end.

Charmed Life is followed by three more full-length Chrestromanci novels—The Magicians of Caprona, Witch Week, The Lives of Christopher Chant and by a collection of short stories, Mixed Magics. All are equally inventive. (Ages 10 and over) —John McLay

In books by fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones, nothing is ever as it seems. And so it is with one of her finest creations——"The Worlds of Chrestomanci".

Here, there are hundreds of other, parallel worlds—each one formed when the result of a big event in history, like a battle or an earthquake, could have been two quite different things. Both things happened, but because they could not exist together, the worlds split apart and took their new courses independently. What's more, it is common for people to have at least one exact double populating several of these other world...

Confused? Don't be—The Magicians of Caprona is the second instalment in the fascinating life of Christopher Chant (better known as Chrestomanci) and explains everything you ever needed to know about magic, witchcraft and the black arts. There are new characters, more surprises, slippery spells and an enchanted romance too!

In the Italian Dukedom of Caprona, the houses of Montana and Petrocchi control everything magical, watched over by its magnificent guardian statue, the Angel. But the families have been feuding for years so when all the spells that are meant to vanquish the threat of war from other city-states all start going wrong—each predictably blames the other. It is only when the young Tonino Montana and Angelica Petrocchi suddenly disappear that rumours of a White Devil who threatens the Angel of Caprona are taken seriously. Family differences must be cast aside to save the day from an evil enchanter, and lives cannot be saved without the involvement of the magic man they call Chrestomanci.

The Magicians of Caprona is the slightly more serious sequel to Charmed Life, and is followed by two further Chrestromanci novels—Witch Week and The Lives of Christopher Chant and a new collection of short stories, Mixed Magics. (Ages 10 and over) —John McLay

The trouble started when Howard came home from school and found the Goon sitting in the kitchen and preventing Fifi from making the tea. As Howard desperately attempts to unravel the mystery, he discovers a ruthless plot to take over the world. The book was nominated for a 1985 World Fantasy Award.

Think of a world, almost like our own but a little more genteel and old-fashioned, where magic and witchcraft is as common as mathematics—but just as dangerous in the wrong hands. In The Lives of Christopher Chant—the fourth book in her Worlds of Chrestomanci series—Diana Wynne Jones succeeds in creating a vision of England close to our expectations of what should be, but subtly different enough to excite our interest and draw us into a strange new world of incredible reality and possibilities.

Christopher Chant is a dreamer, a boy who returns home each night with strange gifts from his nocturnal travels and leaves sand in his bed as proof. He's happy to play cricket and wander the world in secret—so having nine lives and being the next "Chrestomanci" is not part of his plans for the future. It's only when an evil smuggler known as The Wraith threatens his existence that the young Christopher truly takes hold of his destiny. He must try to halt his loss of lives and defeat evil before times runs out.

Set at least 20 years before the events as told in the first Chrestmanci novel, Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant is a detailed fantasy and wild adventure with dollops of humour that will challenge and intrigue every fan of this sequence of otherworldly novels.

Chrestomanci patrols the pages of three more full-length novels—Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona, Witch Week and in a collection of short stories, Mixed Magics. He is undoubtedly Diana Wynne Jones' finest creation and should not be missed. —John McLay

"There are thousands of worlds, all different from ours," says Diana Wynne Jones in the introduction to this collection of four short stories featuring her most famous creation. "Chrestomanci's world is the one next door to us, and the difference is that magic is as common as music is with us." And to the enormous relief of her legion of fans, the author has finally returned to that world again with a brand new story featuring her nine-lived enchanter Chrestomanci, the star of four previous full-length novels: Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona,Witch Week and The Lives of Christopher Chant. "The Stealer of Souls" combines the inhabitants of Chrestomanci Castle during Charmed Life and one of the young characters from The Magicians of Caprona to great effect, creating a tale with all the usual suspects—original fantasy, spooky humour, substantial characters and a dastardly plot to ruin Chrestomanci and take over the worlds. It's vintage Dianna Wynne Jones.

But there's more. Alongside the new story is another not published in the UK before, Carol Oneir's Hundreth Dream. In it, Chrestomanci is called upon to find out why a young dream-maker is unable to realise her landmark hundredth "Dream film". The magician must go deep inside her mind to unravel her true intentions. Two further collected stories from other anthologies—Warlock at the Wheel and The Sage of Theare—both feature characters new and old, making Mixed Magics a tantalising glimpse of the quality of fantasy that has gone before—and hopefully what is still to come. —John McLay

Master fantasist Diana Wynne Jones, author of the Chrestomanci books, scores another winner in The Merlin Conspiracy. This absorbing tale of magic and courtly intrigue is told in two voices. In the world called Islands of the Blest, Roddy is a young page who has grown up travelling with her family in the King's Progress, a constant journey around the kingdom. Just after she and her younger friend Grundo spot a growing conspiracy to overthrow the King and change the balance of magic, they are whisked away to visit Roddy's grim and silent grandfather; when they return the Progress has moved on without them. Meanwhile in another world, Nick Mallory, 14, blunders into a dreamlike adventure that leads him to the powerful wizard Romanov and involves him in Roddy's mission to save the worlds from the upset planned by the conspiracy.

The story moves through several precariously linked worlds in vividly imagined episodes told alternately by Roddy and Nick, as their journeys begin to mesh. Part of the fun for the reader is sorting out Roddy's many wizardly relatives from the double perspective and clicking them into place in the plot. Wynne Jones's many fans will pounce on this complex but fast-moving fantasy that features not only 34 characters, but a panther, a goat, a dragon, and an extremely charming elephant. (Ages 10-14) —Patty Campbell, Amazon.com

Apart from the occasional short story, Diana Wynne Jones' fans have been starved of her most famous creation, the dressing-gown wearing magician Christopher Chant—star of all her Chrestomanci novels—for nearly twenty years. It's been far too long! J.K. Rowling was knee-high to a grasshopper when the first book in this sequence, Charmed Life, hit the shelves in 1977 and, although this hugely talented fantasy author has gone on to create a myriad of other imagined and fantastically crazy worlds, it is her books featuring the world-hopping Chrestomanci that have remained her most appreciated and popular tomes.

In Conrad's Fate, his uncle tells twelve-year-old Conrad Tesdinic that his constant and terrible luck is the result of a shocking dose of bad karma that within the year could threaten his very existence. He is despatched at once to Stallery Mansion, high in the mountainous Alps above his hometown of Stallchester, to work in disguise as a servant. There, in the magical fortress that seems to dominate the whole town, he must infiltrate its workings and seek out the person who has interfered so disastrously with his fate.

Along the way, Conrad strikes up a friendship with a mysterious, self-assured older boy, who has a mission of his own—to find his friend Millie who has hidden herself thereabouts. The discovery that Stallery Mansion lays on a `probability fault' adds gloriously to the wonderment and adventure that inevitably follows.

In some ways a prequel to the earlier novels, in that this book features Chant as a teenager before his Chrestomanci guise, there is definitely no need, however, to read it first. Any of other titles such as Witch Week or The Lives of Christopher Chant will be equally superb introductions to this infamous creation and just as entertaining. (Age 10 and over) —John McLay

Bold As Love is technically a science fiction novel, set as it is in a near future of political collapse and technological development, and yet it sprawls over the border between SF and fantasy. Ax is a rock musician conscripted by the government of post-Union England to consider the future and co-opt the counter-culture. He stays on to run things when the disgusting character, Pigsty, massacres his way to power, and Ax gradually becomes the much-loved centre of power and policy. Part of what keeps him ahead of events is a brain implant with all the information a benevolent despot might need; part is his fey lover Fiorinda and his best friend Sage, who is in love with Fiorinda and not sure of his exact feelings for Ax. These three are almost a latter-day Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot... a fact that does not bode well for the second volume.

Jones' picture of a world falling apart at the seams—with its worryingly coherent portrayal of a competent dictator—is one of the more impressive things she has done; and Fiorinda with her conscience and angst-ridden past is a passionately lovable heroine. —Roz Kaveney

The Eye of the World and its sequels in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series show the extent to which one can go with a traditional fantasy framework, with added gusto. Stock elements are abound: a reluctant hero—in fact five humble village folk—plucked from wholesome obscurity to fight dark powers; an eternal evil enemy who can be defeated but not destroyed, until the end of the world, which is fast approaching; a mysterious sisterhood with vast powers and who love to manipulate thrones and kingdoms from the shadows (think of the Bene Gesserit of the Dune series); a ferocious battle-hardened warrior race (echoes of the Fremen of Dune, or the Haruchai of the Thomas Covenant novels).

Jordan didn't become a bestselling author merely by mixing up traditional ingredients; a master storyteller, he ingeniously gives unusual twists to these conventional fantasy elements. He also excels in the descriptive and narrative skills needed to create a detailed and coherent imaginary world. The many lands he portrays are vast in scope and contain amazingly varied countries and peoples, while retaining the inner coherence needed to make them satisfying places for a fantasy fan to roam around in. However, Jordan's writing never attains the subtlety or sophistication of, say, George RR Martin and there are some annoying stylistic tics: he seems unable to introduce a female character without commenting on her neckline and thereafter has them forever smoothing their dresses.

To his publisher's credit, Jordan's books are fortunate among fantasy novels in not having covers that look like an explosion of a teenager's bedroom. The absence of such lurid artwork is, perhaps, part of their appeal. —David Pickering

Robert Jordan has created a rich and intricate tapestry of characters in his Wheel of Time series. In this seventh volume, Rand al'Thor—the Dragon Reborn—draws ever closer to the Last Battle as a stifling heat grips the world.

Belle de Jour is the nom de plume of a high-class call girl working in London.This is her story. From debating the literary merits of the works of Martin Amis with naked clients, entering a hotel with two whips strapped to the lining of her coat, and juggling her love-life with her professional one, Belle's no-holds-barred account of her experiences as a prostitute is frank, funny and completely compelling. Since the summer of 2003, Belle's award-winning website has charted her day-to-day adventures on and off the field. In it, she has confessed her triumphs and disasters in the world of dating, introduced readers to her friends N and 'the four As' and chronicled the ins and outs of her working life. Now she elaborates on those diary entries, revealing how she became a working girl, what it feels like to do it for money - and why she can recommend it - and where to buy the best knickers for the job. Sometimes shocking, often hilarious, always thought-provoking, the 'Intimate Adventures' is the story of a 21st-century Moll Flanders, giving us an illuminating glimpse behind the scenes of the high-class sex-trade, and an insight into the secret life of an extraordinary, ordinary woman.

A powerful graphic novel about race, identity, stereotypes and love, nominated for "Best Graphic Novel" in the 2002 Firecracker Book Awards and nominated for Harvey and Eisner Comic Industry Awards. This adept look at life after a Korean mail order bride arrives to meet her Canadian husband defies anyone who has an opinion (but no experience) regarding the little-understood world of mail order marriages. Monty Wheeler, a pathetic, emasculated, 39-year-old virgin struggling with his own societal demons, expects Kyung Seo to fulfill his female Asian fantasy stereotype: domestic, obedient, hardworking and loyal. But Kyung, tall and accent-less, is much more human that Monty is ready to accept. Kyung soon finds, in addition to predictable dissatisfaction with her husband's inane expectations, outspoken inspiration in Eve Wong, a western-born Asian woman. Could Eve be Kyung's ticket to rebellious self-fulfillment, or do her actions not always ring true?

Through explorations of art, passion, identity and rebellion, the reader must ponder strength and cowardice while Kyung herself fights a potent war between independence and safety. Kalesniko adroitly juxtaposes Monty's non-sexual, juvenile obsessions with the character's objectification of Kyung, drawing a direct line between loneliness, consumerism, and how the need for order in one's life compromises the approach to matters of the heart. 264 pages b/w illustrations.

On the face of it, the chances of a book about zero offering mind-stretching entertainment would seem to be about, well, zero. But in The Nothing That Is, Harvard University mathematician Robert Kaplan shows that there's a lot more to zero than meets the eye.

Unlike the so-called natural numbers like one, two, three and so on, the origins of zero are incredibly hard to pin down. Humans seem to have done quite well without nothing for tens of thousands of years: not even the Greeks, the master mathematicians of the Ancient World, had a symbol for zero. Or did they? Among the many delights of this book is the way Kaplan reveals the twists and turns in the story of the origin of the symbol for zero and his own suggested resolution of the mystery.

The struggle to do things with zero, such as divide it into other numbers, or use it as the ultimate fine-divider of other numbers—the key idea in the calculus—are brought alive by Kaplan, though without ever resorting to more than simple school algebra. His writing style does sometimes stray beyond the literary and into the florid but overall this compact little essay of history, mystery and maths should give you entertainment and mental stimulation in equal measure. —Robert Matthews

Guy Gavriel Kay's fantasy career began with "The Fionavar Tapestry", a popular trilogy mixing Arthurian and Tolkienian themes. He's since developed an original vein of alternate- historical fiction; richly suspenseful stories whose period settings have different country names and added magic. The Lions of Al- Rassan reinvented medieval Spain; Sailing to Sarantium lovingly reflects the intrigue and splendour of the Byzantine Empire, and echoes W.B. Yeats's famous Byzantium poems. Magic exists: at least one old god is horribly real, and those artificial singing birds celebrated by Yeats take their life from an unexpected, creepy source. Sarantium City is intensely imagined, with dynastic upheavals, riot and rebellion, a smashing chariot race, and knives glinting in every alley. There's sharp intelligence here, too. The hero, an outlander mosaic expert summoned to decorate Sarantium's newest and greatest dome, faces his worst test at the Emperor's court—where mechanical trickery lurks, conversation is double-edged, exile awaits the loser in a debate on mosaic techniques, and there's a Sherlockian challenge to deduce how the top charioteer pulled off a magical-seeming coup. Kay has laid fine groundwork for this new series "The Sarantine Mosaic", with more to follow. —David Langford

Guy Gavriel Kay's tales of kingdoms and empires that never quite were blend real history with an economic use of magic; blink and you would almost miss the interventions of the supernatural. Lord of Emperorsis the second half of his The Sarantium Mosaic, a full-blooded and passionate epic of Byzantine intrigue and artistic commitment. All of his characters are in the great city of Sarantium now—Crispin, the great mosaicist, Gisel, the exiled queen of the barbarian kingdom of the West and Rustem, the brilliant young doctor and unwilling spy. Emperor Valerius and his wife Alixena have plans for their world—they are summoning troops from all directions—and plans for their city. Crispin is working on the dome of the great temple; and yet time and chance, those rulers that lie beyond all emperors, will ultimately dispose of all plans and all planners. Kay is as good on the manners of charioteers—there is a particularly fine chariot race here—as he is on the double-crossings of generals and imperial secretaries. This is a rich complex fantasy with a real sense of how its world works. —Roz Kaveney

Fergal Keane's incisive television reporting, rightly ranking him as a distinguished foreign correspondent, hones his trademark short, sharp sentences that have penetrated the surface of events and circumstance around the world upon Britain in this, his latest venture, based upon a BBC series. He is a wonderful observer, offering not an overview but an underview of the state of the nation. Writing with a controlled passion, he treads the byways rather than highways, giving voice to marginalised men and women whose stoicism somehow sustains them as they stand stranded on the sidelines of the meritocracy march. Whether it is Glasgow shipyard workers fighting to save their jobs, farming communities in North Wales and Devon struggling to survive, or the dispossessed and degraded on a Leeds estate downtrodden by social depravation, Keane brings his integrity and warm humanity to the telling of unsung heroics and courage against the unfriendly forces of economics and environment. When his objectivity is allowed to slip by recalling his own childhood experiences around Dublin—he has chapters on Catholics and Protestants in a town in Ulster subverting entrenched sectarianism-it is not out of a personal sentimentality but a felt need to comprehend (for himself and therefore his readers) the pain and pride he encounters on his journey. Keane is no idealist, he carries no ideological baggage, but the incurable optimist in him believes that more should and could be done. —Michael Hatfield

The computer revolution brought with it new methods of getting work done—just look at today's news for reports of hard-driven, highly motivated young men and women developing software and online commerce who sacrifice evenings and weekends to meet impossible deadlines. Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and build a new 32-bit minicomputer in just one year. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells us stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring new college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling yet engendering a new kind of work ethic.

These days, we are used to the "total commitment" philosophy of managing technical creation, but Kidder was surprised and even a little alarmed at the obsessions and compulsions he found. From in-house political struggles to workers permitted to tease management to marathon 24-hour work sessions, The Soul of a New Machine explores concepts that already seem familiar, even old-hat, less than 20 years later. Kidder plainly admires his subjects; while he admits to hopeless confusion about their work, he finds their dedication heroic. The reader wonders, though, what will become of it all, now and in the future. —Rob Lightner

It is a story as fascinating as anything in one of Patrick O'Brian's much-acclaimed nautical adventures. Who was the man himself? Those who have avidly consumed such superb novels as Master and Commander and Treason's Harbour will find Dean King's Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed not only an authoritative guide to his work, but a tale of intrigue quite as beguiling as anything in the master's oeuvre. Initially commissioned as a modern-day successor to CS Forester (with a brief to inaugurate a series to rival the Hornblower books), O'Brian's chronicles of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars steadily grew into a saga far richer and more ambitious than its inspiration, and the author became a source of intense interest. O'Brian, though, was highly secretive (his editor warned "Patrick will make you feel odious and wormlike if you look into his private life"), and the terse version of his CV that he produced for public consumption intrigued King (an established authority on nautical literature and history, as well as on O'Brian himself), and he began to dig beneath the carefully constructed public persona. What he found went far beyond such discoveries as the fact that O'Brian was not Irish (as most readers believed) and that his career had taken a considerably different trajectory from that he had presented his interviewers with. And just how much of the author was in his heroes?

It's surprising that this is the first biography of this enigmatic talent—and as well as King's assiduous piercing of O'Brian's mysteries, this is a superlative celebration of one of the most amazing bodies of fiction produced in the 20th century. Again and again, King performs the key function of a literary biographer: he inspires in the reader an intense desire to return to his subject's work, armed with a host of new insights. King is particularly acute on the development of such characters as Captain Jack Aubrey (one of the most complex creations in all adventure fiction), and the illumination of how much of the author may be found in his most celebrated creations is one of the key pleasures of the book. Most of all, though, it's the communication of the biographer's enthusiasm for his subject that leaps off the page: Suddenly, it became apparent that while O'Brian may or may not have surpassed Forester in sea action, he had created great novels that did not look quite like anything that had come before. His evocation of Nelson's Royal Navy was an escapist world as appealing as J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, as culturally rich as William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and as intriguingly ritualistic as Umberto Eco's medieval monastery in The Name of the Rose. In this setting, almost flawlessly sustained in the more than five-thousand-page opus, O'Brian had examined his two primary themes, love and friendship, from myriad angles, with extraordinary lucidity and a stylistic range to rival the best novelists. Critics no longer compared him to CS Forester but to Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Homer. —Barry Forshaw