Paola Merla Books

"The old master has us again in the palm of his hand." ― Los Angeles Times Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey's crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey's career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surprise is nearly sunk on her way to South America―where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain―the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences. The South American expedition is a desperate affair; and in the end Jack's bold initiative to strike at the vastly superior Spanish fleet precipitates a spectacular naval action that will determine both Chile's fate and his own.

Amid sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent explore ships of the East India Company. Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship against an enemy enjoying overwhelming local superiority. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean lies the prize that could make him rich - ships sent by Napoleon to attack the China Fleet.

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of their beginning, with Master and Commander, these evocative stories are being re-issued in paperback with smart new livery. This is the thirteenth book in the series.

Captain Bligh (yes, the guy from the Bounty) needs to be rescued, and the Royal Navy has the perfect man for the job: Captain Jack Aubrey. With his friend and cloak-and-dagger expert Stephen Maturin in tow, Aubrey sets off for Australia. Several factors, including an attractive spy and a small-scale epidemic, conspire to change his plans, and before long his frigate is being pursued into Antarctic waters by a Dutch man-of-war.

The first book in the Treasures of the Nile series Anippe has grown up in the shadows of Egypt’s good god Pharaoh, aware that Anubis, god of the afterlife, may take her--or her siblings--at any moment. She watched him snatch her mother and infant brother during childbirth, a moment which awakens in her a terrible dread of ever bearing a child. When she learns that she is to be become the bride of Sebak, a kind but quick-tempered Captain of Pharaoh Tut’s army, Anippe launches a series of deceptions with the help of the Hebrew midwives—women ordered by Tut to drown the sons of their own people in the Nile—in order to provide Sebak the heir he deserves and yet protect herself from the underworld gods. When she finds a baby floating in a basket on the great river, Anippe believes Egypt’s gods have answered her pleas, entrenching her more deeply in deception and placing her and her son Mehy, whom handmaiden Miriam calls Moses, in mortal danger. As bloodshed and savage politics shift the balance of power in Egypt, the gods reveal their fickle natures and Anippe wonders if her son, a boy of Hebrew blood, could one day become king. Or does the god of her Hebrew servants, the one they call El Shaddai, have a different plan for them all?

1786. Il comandante di vascello William Rennie e il suo secondo James Hayter sono a terra, desiderosi di tornare a navigare dopo una preoccupante pausa nella loro carriera nella marina militare, quando ricevono una missione particolarmente importante: la messa a punto della nave di Sua Maestà Expedient, una fregata da trentasei cannoni. Dopo un varo difficile e l'ancor più complessa organizzazione di un equipaggio non proprio di prim'ordine, superano il mitico capo Horn e veleggiano nel Pacifico, apparentemente incaricati di svolgere una missione scientifica. Ma gli ordini segreti, rivelati solo in mare aperto, sono differenti...

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. All eighteen books are being re-issued in hardback by HarperCollins with stunning new jackets to coincide with a new film based on the adventures and to introduce these modern classics to a new generation. It is still the War of 1812. Patrick O'Brian takes his hero Jack Aubrey and his tetchy, sardonic friend Stephen Maturin on a voyage as fascinating as anything he has ever written. They set course across the South Atlantic to intercept a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. If they do not come up with her before she rounds the Horn, they must follow her into the Great South Sea and as far across the Pacific as she may lead them. It is a commission after Jack's own heart. Maturin has fish of his own to fry in the world of secret intelligence. Aubrey has to cope with a succession of disasters - men overboard, castaways, encounters with savages, storms, typhoons, groundings, shipwrecks, to say nothing of murder and criminal insanity. That the enemy is in fact faithfully dealt with, no one who has the honour of Captain Aubrey's acquaintance can take leave to doubt.

Margrave is a no-account little town in Georgia.Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles in the rain, just passing through.An arbitrary decision, a tribute to a guitar player who died there decades before. But Margrave has just had its firs

Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me … The year is 1806. England is beleaguered by the long war with Napoleon, and centuries have passed since practical magicians faded into the nation's past. But scholars of this glorious history discover that one remains: the reclusive Mr Norrell whose displays of magic send a thrill through the country. Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange. Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very opposite of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms the one between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.

Set during the winter of 1946, one of the coldest on record, "Pavel and I" mines post-war Berlin's messy terrain through the lives of two Pavel, an American soldier who stays on after the war, and Anders, a German orphan. Their paths cross when an ailing Pavel seeks medicine on the black market for his failing kidneys. Anders follows Pavel home with thoughts of stealing from him, but ultimately stays on to help nurse him back to health. A friendship of mutual need and genuine tenderness develops. When a dead Russian spy is delivered to Pavel's frozen apartment, Pavel and Anders find themselves caught in the beginnings of a Cold War conspiracy of epic proportions. Complete with a secret love affair between Pavel and the German mistress of a menacing British military official, and peopled with pimps, prostitutes, Russian and English spies and a Lord-of-the-Flies-style gang of child thieves, "Pavel and I" is a unique, breathtaking noir novel.

A romantic historical adventure, set in the tyrannical court of King Ismail, the17th-century ruler of Morocco.

Epic adventure, grand passion and historical intrigue in the bestselling tradition of Wilbur Smith.

Essere al comando di un veliero, dare la caccia alle navi nemiche nel Mediterraneo o in pieno Atlantico, vivere in prima persona arrembaggi e duelli: questi sono i sogni di Jack Aubrey, uomo di mare temerario e irruente, fedele suddito di Sua Maestà Britannica e capitano di corvetta fresco di nomina. E se la Sophie - la sua prima nave, il suo «primo comando» - non brilla ancora di particolare gloria, Aubrey è deciso a trasformarla in una nave modello, orgoglio della Royal Navy e spauracchio dei nemici a tutte le latitudini. Ma la dura vita di bordo gli riserverà grosse sorprese... Avvincente e serrato nell'intreccio, straordinariamente documentato nella ricostruzione storica e meticolosamente preciso nella descrizione della vita marinaresca del XIX secolo: Primo comando è uno dei migliori romanzi storici di avventure sui mari che siano mai stati scritti.