The Yellow Admiral is the 18th installment in Patrick O'Brian's masterful cycle of sea stories, which take place during the Napoleonic wars and feature two of adventure fiction's most memorable and multi-dimensional characters. Jack Aubrey is a British sea-captain aboard men-of-war; he's spirited, exuberant, patriotic and possessed of an immense instinct for all that is nautical. Stephen Maturin is his bastard Irish/Catalan ship's surgeon; he's intellectual, withdrawn, cerebral and a voluntary spy for the Crown—not for love of Britain but for hatred of Napoleon. Over the previous 17 novels, cult classics all, the two men's unlikely friendship has blossomed through countless naval engagements, pirate attacks, mothers-in-law, the politics of the British Admiralty, daring rescues by night, war with the mongrel Americans, and countless other dangers of almost 300 years ago. O'Brian has been favorably compared to Jane Austen, not only for the period he writes about, but also because of the liquid, mannered style he uses to show the reader how his characters lived, what their contemporaries did and why, and above all, how they felt. If O'Brian is Austen's successor, he's certainly more complete: Where Austen's brittle middle-class folk mostly sat in the country and prattled about whom to marry, O'Brian's people are vivid men and women from all walks of life, busy taking part in a world-spanning empire which was built upon rum, sodomy and the lash—and which is already beginning to decay. Like all of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, the joy is in the people as much as the story, which in this case revolves around no less than Napoleon's escape from Elba. Read this book. Read them all. Huzzah.