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Master and Commander, first published in 1969, is a novel in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin series, which includes twenty completed books. Some critics have found fault with the abrupt endings of Master and Commander and other books in the series, saying that they do not finish conclusively but arbitrarily stop. Other critics, however, argue that the books should not be thought of as discrete texts with traditional beginnings and endings but as a single incredibly long work, similar to other multivolume stories, such as John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga.