Amazon.com Amazon.com Audiobook Review (ISBN 0393325172, Paperback)

Since Patrick O'Brian launched his series of historical novels with Master and Commander in 1970, millions of readers have enjoyed the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, surgeon Stephen Maturin. O'Brian's prose, so immediate and yet so distinctly capturing the language and culture of the English navy in the first moments of the 19th century, rolls effortlessly off the tongue of actor Robert Hardy. Never for a second do we doubt that this is the way an English naval officer would have expressed himself in 1800, and that these are the sights, sounds, and emotions he encountered. As Aubrey sails his ship into battle, we don't need the sounds of cannon to share this moment with him; Hardy's voice is the ideal instrument. (Running time: 4.5 hours, three cassettes) --Lou Schuler

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0006499155, Paperback)

3 Cassettes, 4 1/2 hours
Read by Robert Hardy
Abridged
AudioBook contains an illustration of the sails of a square-rigged ship.

The 1st installment in O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series

"The best historical novels ever written..."
-The New York Times Book Review

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars.  Details of 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 road of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0786186291, Audio CD)

Captain Jack Aubrey is ashore on half pay without a command, until Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders for Aubrey to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore’s pennant, there to mount an expedition against the French-held islands of Mauritius and La Réunion. But the difficulties of carrying out his orders are compounded by two of his own captains—Lord Clonfert, a pleasure-seeking dilettante, and Captain Corbett, whose severity pushes his crew to the verge of mutiny.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0786127635, Audio Cassette)

This first novel in the series establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship’s surgeon and intelligence agent, in the thrilling setting of a British man-of-war engaged in the Napoleonic wars.