Nautical Fiction
Dive into the best nautical fiction books! Explore thrilling sea adventures, epic naval battles, and maritime tales from classic and modern authors. Perfect for fans of ocean stories.
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Master and Commander (Vol. Book 1) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)
by Patrick O'Brian
The beginning of the sweeping Aubrey-Maturin series. "The best sea story I have ever read."—Sir Francis Chichester This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
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Mutiny on the Bounty
by Charles Nordhoff
A British crew mutinies against the cruel commander of the Bounty in 1787.
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The Phantom Ship
by Frederick Marryat
Maritime legend holds that a spectral ship, The Flying Dutchman, haunts the seas around the Cape of Good Hope. Philip Vanderdecken's father is the captain of that ship, condemned to sail and torment sailors until the Day of Judgement. The 'Phantom Ship' is the tale of Philip Vanderdecken's search for his cursed father and the Dutchman's ghostly crew.
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Midshipman Bolitho
by Alexander Kent
The year is 1772, and Richard Bolitho is a sixteen-year-old midshipman about to undergo a severe initiation into the game of seamanship. The book follows young Bolitho's adventures as he intercepts and destroys a band of vicious pirates and then is swept away on a dangerous mission through the treacherous stamping ground of smugglers, wreckers, and murderers.
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The Sea-Wolf
by Jack London
Humphrey Van Weyden becomes an unwilling participant in a tense shipboard drama. A deranged and abusive sea captain perpetrates a shipboard atmosphere of increasing violence that ultimately boils into mutiny, shipwreck, and a desperate confrontation. This 1904 maritime classic depicts the clash of materialistic and idealistic cultures with a mixture of gritty realism and sublime lyricism.
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Moby-Dick, Or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
On board the whaling ship Pequod a crew of wise men and fools, renegades and seeming phantoms is hurled through treacherous seas by a crazed captain hell-bent on hunting down the mythic White Whale. Melville transforms the little world of the whale-ship into a crucible where mankind¿s fears, faith and frailties are pitted against a relentless fate. Teeming with ideas and imagery, and with its extraordinary, compressed intensity sustained by mischievous irony and moments of exquisite beauty, Moby-Dick is both a great American epic and a most profoundly imaginative literary creation. With an afterword by Nigel Cliff. Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.
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Castaways of the Flying Dutchman
by Brian Jacques
Ben and his dog, Ned, are trapped aboard the "Flying Dutchman", cursed to sail the seas forever. Setting off on a journey of their own, exploring new places and times, they land in the Victorian village of Chapelvale. If Ben and Ned can figure out the clues and riddles they keep discovering, perhaps they can save Chapelvale and its people.
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Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
by Jean Lee Latham
Winner of the 1956 Newbery Medal, this novel tells the story of 18th-century mathematical wizard Nathaniel Bowditch, whose determination to master sea navigation resulted in "The American Practical Navigator."
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The Oxford Book of Sea Stories
by Tony Tanner
From Herman Melville (who wrote no short stories) we read his account of the final three days of the chase of Moby-Dick, which concludes that novel and is one of the high points in American literature.
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The Secret Sharer and Other Stories
by Joseph Conrad
Great adventures of the sea and of the soul, related by a novelist considered one of the greatest writers in the language. Contains three of Conrad's most powerful stories —"Youth: A Narrative" (1898), "Typhoon" (1902) and "The Secret Sharer" (1910) — each probing deeply, suspensefully into the mysteries of human character.
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Captain Blood
by Rafael Sabatini
The courages Captain Peter Blood is the valiant hero of this adventure-filled tale set on the high seas.
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The Sea-hawk
by Rafael Sabatini
Sir Oliver Tessilian, a Cornish nobleman, is abandoned or betrayed by everyone he ever loved. He is framed for murder, affronted and shunned by his fiancA(c) and sold into slavery by his half brother.
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The Raven
by Peter Landesman
In 1941, 36 people from a small New England mill town went on a picnic to an island on the boat, Raven. The Raven and all the men, except the captain, were never found. The women and the captain were found, drowned. This novel tells of years of speculation and grief brought about by this mysterious tragedy.
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Moontide
by Erin Patrick
Set amid the breathtaking scenery of coastal Maine, driven by the hypnotic pulse of the sea, Moontide is a work of lyrical darkness whose stunning climax will take you from the edge of your seat to the edge of the world.
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Captains Courageous
by Rudyard Kipling
A millionaire's spoiled son learns a lesson when, saved from drowning by a fishing schooner, he is made to share the crude life and hard work of his taunting rescuers
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On Stranger Tides
by Tim Powers
In 1718, John Chandagnac, a bookkeeper and puppeteer, unwittingly sails into the company of Blackbeard the pirate, encounters zombie-crewed wrecks, and is caught up in a search for the Fountain of Youth.