Desolation Island

This fifth novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series sends Captain Jack Aubrey in the ageing fifty-gun Leopard on a voyage toward Australia with a party of convicts, among them the American agent Louisa Wogan. Stephen Maturin sails as surgeon and intelligence officer, attending a gaol-fever outbreak and watching Wogan and her associates. In the Southern Ocean the ship fights a Dutch seventy-four in heavy seas and is later crippled among ice. The company fetches up at a remote island to refit. The book is a naval adventure about a damaged ship, political prisoners, and the strain of a long passage under orders that leave little margin.

Bound in dark bue buckram, cover blocked in gilt and colour with a design by Neil Gower. Blue slipcase.