Mostrando resultados por autor "Patrick O’Brian" en Todas las categorías

In The Mauritius Command, Captain Jack Aubrey is ashore on half-pay without a command until his friend, occasional intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, arrives with secret orders for Aubrey to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a Commodore's pennant. But the difficulties of carrying out his orders are compounded by two of his own captains: one a pleasure-seeking dilettante, the other liable to provoke the crew to mutiny. Based on an actual campaign of 1810 in the Indian Ocean.

Widely regarded as the most engaging historical novels ever written, the 21 books in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series have garnered millions of fans since the publication of the first volume over 50 years ago. Included here are BBC radio adaptations of the first seven thrilling stories.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans now of many battles, return to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But, this is a longer, harder, colder war than the dashing frigate actions of their early days. When a sudden turn of events takes them off on a hazardous mission, they must depend on all of their seamanship skills and Jack's proverbial luck.

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In the twentieth and final installment of Patrick O'Brian's hugely successful Aubrey/Maturin series, Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace takes on an ugly complexion for Jack Aubrey: drunken, violent celebrations of the English sailors in Gibraltar; the desertion of nearly half his crew; and the sudden dimming of his own career prospects in a peacetime navy.

Having survived a long and desperate adventure in the Great South Sea, Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to England to very different circumstances. For Jack it is a happy homecoming, at least initially, but for Stephen it is disastrous: his little daughter appears to be autistic, incapable of speech or contact, while his wife, Diana, unable to bear this situation, has disappeared, her house being looked after by the widowed Clarissa Oakes.

Jack Aubrey 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.

Captain Jack Aubrey sets sail for the South China Sea with a new lease on life. Following his dismissal from the Royal Navy, he has earned reinstatement through his daring exploits as a privateer.

Life ashore may once again be the undoing of Jack Aubrey in The Yellow Admiral, Patrick O'Brian's best-selling novel and eighteenth volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Aubrey, now a considerable though impoverished landowner, has dimmed his prospects at the admiralty by his erratic voting as a member of Parliament; he is feuding with his neighbor, a man with strong navy connections who wants to enclose the common land between their estates.

It is still the War of 1812 and Jack Aubrey - with his tetchy, sardonic friend Stephen Maturin - has set course across the South Atlantic to intercept a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. If they do not come up with her before she rounds the Horn, they must follow her into the Great South Sea and as far across the Pacific as she may lead them.

Jack Aubrey returns from his duties protecting whalers off South America and is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make investments in the City on the strength of supposedly certain information. This innocent decision ensnares him in the London criminal underground and in government espionage - the province of his friend Stephen Maturin. Is Aubrey's humiliation and the threatened ruin of his career a deliberate plot?

At the opening of a voyage filled with disaster and delight, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are in pursuit of a privateer sailing under American colours through the Great South Sea. Stephen's objective is to set the revolutionary tinder of South America ablaze to relieve the pressure on the British government which has blundered into war with the young and uncomfortably vigorous United States. The shock and barbarity of hand-to-hand fighting are sharpened by O'Brian's exact sense of period, his eye for landscape and his feel for a ship under sail.

The War of 1812 continues, and Jack Aubrey sets course for Cape Horn on a mission after his own heart: intercepting a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. Stephen Maturin has fish of his own to fry in the world of secret intelligence. Disaster in various guises awaits them... Browse more Patrick O'Brian.

Captain Jack Aubrey, RN, arrives in the Dutch East Indies to find himself appointed to the command of the fastest and best-armed frigate in the navy. He and his friend, Stephen Maturin, take passage for England in a dispatch vessel. But the War of 1812 breaks out while they are en route. Bloody actions precipitate them both into new and unexpected scenes where Stephen's past activities as a secret agent return on him with a vengeance.

Sent to rescue Governor Bligh, former captain of HMS Bounty, Jack Aubrey sets off for Australia in the Leopold with his friend, Stephen Maturin, and a hold full of convicts in this fifth of the Aubrey/Maturin series. A beautiful and dangerous spy lurks among these prisoners, as does an even more lethal traveling companion, gaol fever, a treacherous disease that decimates the crew. With a Dutch man-of-war to windward, the under-manned, outgunned Leopold sails for her life into the freezing waters of the Antarctic. There in mountainous seas, the Dutchman closes.

A British whaler has been captured in the Friendly Isles, and Captain Jack Aubrey is dispatched with the Surprise to restore order. But a female convict who escaped from the penal colony in New South Wales has stowed away in the cable-tier. To the officers, Clarissa Harvill is an object of awkward courtliness and dangerous jealousies...

While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assumes the center stage; for the dockyards and salons of Malta are alive with Napoleon's agents, and the admiralty's intelligence network is compromised. Maturin's cunning is the sole bulwark against sabotage of Aubrey's daring mission.

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The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. With writing from Greg Child, David Roberts, Stephen Venables, Alfred Lansing and others, Epic is a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world’s most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions!

Shipwrecked on a remote island, Captain Aubrey and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck, only to have their makeshift vessel burned in an attack by Malay pirates. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the ingenuity of Patrick O'Brian - or Stephen Maturin - could devise.

In their 16th outing, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin pursue a prize into the Great Southern Ocean. The story takes Maturin to South America. Caught up in a failed coup, he flees across the Andes. Aubrey makes a desperate voyage in a open boat, but both survive and are reunited.

This riveting collection of adventure writing includes the work of The Perfect Storm author, Sebastian Junger. Listen as men and women battle the elements, and often each other, to stay alive, confronting sharks, savage storms, rogue waves, mountainous icebergs, starvation, and their own fear and suffering.