Authors starting with O from Read It Again Sam

MASTER AND COMMANDER is the first volume in the O'Brian's delightful series about the English Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, in which Jack Aubrey (a captain in the Royal Navy) and Stephen Maturin (who will become his ship's surgeon and closest friend) first meet, in April 1800 at a performance of Locatelli's C-major Quartet at a concert in Minorca. This first installment is a beautifully written and observed novel of war, friendship, love, and--not incidentally--natural history, amateur music-making, the British intelligence network, and 18th-century life in general. The book was the basis for the successful and critically acclaimed 2003 movie.

In Patrick O'Brian's novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, Jack Aubrey sails around Cape Horn to prevent an American ship from interfering in the British whaling trade, while his sidekick Stephen Maturin calls into play all his intelligence sources.

O'Brian's first novel about the sea, THE GOLDEN OCEAN, took inspiration from Commodore Anson's circumnavigation of the globe in 1740. In THE UNKNOWN SHORE, O'Brian returns to this rich source. One of the ships was parted from the squadron in the fierce storms off Cape Horn, struggled alone up the coast of Chile and soon smashed on the rocks. A surplus of rum, dwindling stores of food, and a hated captain soon drove the men to drunkenness and mutiny. After many months of extreme hardship, the survivors reached safety in Valparaiso. This is the background for the saga of midshipman Jack Byron and surgeon's mate Tobias Barrow.

When Maura Finnegan inherits a factory and house in Dublin, she plans to sell them quickly and use the money to help out Finnegan's Freeze Dried Cabbage, a flailing company her father left her. But the ghost of the house, Fitzwilliam Connolly, murdered over 200 years ago, has other ideas.

A contemporary New Yorker falls for a man who died in 1935.

Originally published in 1936 as "Mary Lavelle", this novel is a coming-of-age story about a young woman who leaves her native Ireland to work as a governess in a family of Spanish aristocrats. Unlike other girls of her age, class, and background, Mary is determined to live life unconventionally: among other things, she repudiates her Catholicism, has an affair with a married man, and develops a passion for bullfighting. The novel was banned in Ireland when it was first published because of its adulterous romance and the sympathetic depiction of a lesbian character.

In the decaying New England factory town of Quinsigamond, an activist priest meets a grisly death inside his own cathedral. The prime suspect is a demented ex-FBI agent named Speer who is searching for the jammers who have been hijacking local radio airwaves. Detective Hannah Shaw tracks Speer's obsessive quest to Wireless, the funky, retro-radio nightclub and epicenter of the diverse jammer subculture. Here, Detective Shaw and members of Wireless must stop the defrocked agent--or fall prey to a campaign of censorship and violence.

The priest in a small Irish village speculates about why the once thriving place declined into a virtual ghost town.