The Shores of Tripoli

Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates

By: James L. Haley

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

The first novel in a brilliant new series by award-winning historian James L. Haley, featuring young midshipman Bliven Putnam as he begins his naval service aboard the USS Enterprise.

It is 1801, and President Thomas Jefferson has assembled a deep-water navy to fight the growing threat of piracy, as American civilians are regularly kidnapped by Islamist brigands and held for ransom, enslaved, or killed, all at their captors' whim. The Berber States of North Africa, especially Tripoli, claimed their faith gave them the right to pillage anyone who did not submit to their religion.

Young Bliven Putnam, great-nephew of Revolutionary War hero Israel Putnam, is bound for the Mediterranean and a desperate battle with the pirate ship Tripoli. He later returns under the legendary Commodore Edward Preble on the Constitution and marches across the Libyan desert with General Eaton to assault Derna - discovering the lessons he learns about war and life are not what he expected.

Rich with historical detail and cracking with high-wire action, The Shores of Tripoli brings this amazing period in American history to life with brilliant clarity.

©2016 James L. Haley (P)2016 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“The history is thoroughly researched, the fiction inventive, the style at once easygoing and rapid.... This is a marvelous and richly enjoyable novel, and the intended series to follow promises to do for the American Navy and the Marines what C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian did for the Royal Navy.... More, please.” (Wall Street Journal)

“James L. Haley has taken the naval adventure genre to places it has not gone before, filled with strong, believable characters who nearly jump of the page, deeply researched details of life both here and abroad...and a powerful, sweeping view of one of the seminal events in the early history of our country...a rollicking good time.” (Brian Kilmeade, author of Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates)

“It's a rare novelist who has a commanding grasp of history, and it's a rare historian who has an intuitive understanding of how to bring fictional characters to life. Fortunately for us readers of the Shores of Tripoli - and (please!) of the next book about Lieutenant Bliven Putnam - James L. Haley fuses historian and novelist into a spellbinding storytelling whole. There could be no better captain to sail this ship.” (Stephen Harrigan, best-selling author of The Gates of the Alamo and A Friend of Mr. Lincoln)