O'Brian's "Aubrey-Maturin" novels sold over three million copies during the author's lifetime, much of that volume occurring in the final decade of his life.
Critics have also lauded O'Brian's work. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Richard Snow praised O'Brian for his historical verisimilitude: "Without ever seeming antiquarian or pedantic or showy, O'Brian summoned up with casual omniscience the workaday magic of a vanished time." Snow further noted that the novelist "presents the lost arcana of that hard-pressed, cruel, courageous world with an immediacy that makes it workings both comprehensible and fascinating." Chicago Sun-Times contributor Stephen Becker noted that "there is not a writer alive whose work I value over his." Mark Horowitz similarly declared in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that "O'Brian is a novelist, pure and simple, one of the best we have." Time's John Skow commented that O'Brian's score of "Aubrey-Maturin" historical novels of "blood, storms and friendship" comprise "the author's masterwork," and constituted "an astonishing naval saga." Skow further observed: "This is not genre writing, agreeable trash to be pigeonholed. If salt-soaked comparison is required, O'Brian's adventures suggest Joseph Conrad's sea tales more than those of C.
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