High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Road to Samarcand is a novel by English author Patrick O`Brian, published in 1954 and set in Asia during the 1930s. Magazine Publishers Weekly writes about the novel: "Six decades later, O`Brian`s richly told adventure saga, with its muscular prose, supple dialogue and engaging characters, packs a nice old-school punch."The Road to Samarcand precedes by 15 years the first novel of the Aubrey-Maturin series, the canon which brought O`Brian fame, and bears a relationship to its development.