DescriptionBest-selling author Patrick O'Brian turns to Commodore Anson's famous 1740 voyage for this rich tale of exploration and adventure. In The Unknown Shore, the inspiration for and immediate precursor to the acclaimed and immensely popular Aubrey/Maturin series, O'Brian's splendid prose and enthralling attention to detail launches listeners, spellbound, into the Age of Discovery.
DescriptionCaptain Jack Aubrey sails away from the brutal Australian prison colonies, returned to his favourite ship the Surprise, but pondering on middle age and sexual frustration. Furthermore, he soon becomes aware that he is out of touch with the mood of his ship: to his astonishment he finds that in spite of a lifetime's experience he does not know what the foremast hands or even his own officers are thinking. They know, as he does not, that the Surprise has a stranger aboard, but what they do not know is that the stranger is potentially as dangerous as lighting the powder magazine itself.
DescriptionThis is the 20th book in Patrick O'Brian's highly acclaimed, best-selling series chronicling the adventures of lucky Jack Aubrey and his best friend Stephen Maturin, part ship's doctor, part secret agent. Napoleon's hundred days of freedom and his renewed threat to Europe have ended at Waterloo and Aubrey has finally, as the title suggests, become a blue level admiral. He and Maturin have, at last, set sail on their much postponed mission to Chile. Vivid with the salty tang of life at sea, O'Brian's writing is as powerful as ever whether he writes of navel hierarchies, night-actions, or the most celebrated fictional friendship since that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Blue at the Mizzen also brings alive the sights and sounds of revolutionary South America in a story as exciting as any O'Brian has written.
DescriptionJack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans of many battles, return in this novel to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But Jack is now a senior Captain commanding a line-of-battle ship sent out to reinforce the squadron blockading Toulon, and this is a longer, harder, colder war than the dashing frigate actions of his early days. A sudden turn of events takes him and Stephen off on a hazardous mission to the Greek Islands. All his old skills of seamanship and his proverbial luck when fighting against odds come triumphantly into their own.
DescriptionAs The Thirteen-Gun Salute opens, Jack Aubrey has been reinstated to his command, and he and his old friend Dr Maturin are sailing on a secret mission with a hand-picked crew, most of them shipmates from the adventures and lucrative voyages of earlier years. But Patrick O'Brian's resourcefulness is a sure warrant that things will not turn out as his readers or characters expect. Twists and turns, sub-plots, echoes from the past, these are the only certainties in this astonishing novel. Distant waters, exotic scenes, flora and fauna to satisfy Maturin's innocent curiosity as well as scope for his cloak and dagger work enrich its flow. The ending leaves the reader more than usually impatient for its successor.
DescriptionIt is still the War of 1812. Patrick O'Brian takes his hero Jack Aubrey and his sardonic friend Stephen Maturin on a voyage as fascinating as anything he has ever written. They set course across the South Atlantic to intercept a powerful American frigate…
