The Golden Ocean, by Patrick O'Brian (HarperCollins, £6.99 in UK)

This, it seems, was the very first of Patrick O'Brian's long line of novels about the sea and fighting ships, though it is set in an earlier period from his usual Napoleonic or late 18th-century one. The hero, an Irish midshipman, signs up for Commodore Anson's famous voyage around the world in 1740, in which five ships set out but only one returned - though laden with captured Spanish treasure, and having circumnavigated the globe. It is, needless to say, a good fluent yarn and seemingly sure of its period and its nautical background, though with rather more of a Boys' Own Paper flavour than the later sea stories show.