Showing results by author "Patrick O’Brian" in All Categories

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.

With a beleaguered Britain already facing war on two fronts – against Napoleon’s armies in Europe but also against the young and vigorous United States – the objective of ship’s surgeon and spy Stephen Maturin is to light the touch paper of Peruvian revolutionary fervour, all while Captain Jack Aubrey engages with their many and varied enemies at sea.

Persa la "Sophie", Jack Aubrey e Stephen Maturin si ritrovano senza una nave, ma ben provvisti di quattrini grazie alle numerose prede catturate durante la navigazione nel Mediterraneo dalla gloriosa corvetta. D'intesa, i due amici decidono di ritirarsi per qualche tempo in campagna... dimenticando però che la terraferma riserva spesso brutte sorprese agli uomini di mare. E infatti la parentesi idilliaca viene bruscamente interrotta; raggirato dal proprio contabile, Jack si ritrova pieno di debiti ed è costretto alla fuga verso la Spagna.

The war is over, the armies dispersed, and the former Emperor of the French has been consigned to a Mediterranean island, yet now he is marching again on Paris with an ever-growing army. Commodore Jack Aubrey and his convoy are tasked with destroying enemy shipyards along the Adriatic coast and cutting off the financial support from that quarter, in a fast and furious race to stop the Corsican from regaining all he’s lost.

For those who dare, things often go wrong on the sea. Deep Blue offers some of literature's greatest stories about the ocean and the people who risk its wrath. Castaways, pirates, and victims of shipwreck all fight to survive in far-flung places and under harrowing circumstances. Together, these works offer a convincing reminder of the sea's dangers and mysteries.

Jack Aubrey is a naval officer, a post-captain of experience and capacity. When The Letter of Marque opens he has been struck off the Navy List for a crime he has not committed. With Aubrey is his friend and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, who is also an unofficial British intelligence agent.

With rumours of peace running rampant, Captain Jack Aubrey chances his luck on the stock exchange. However, when his plans go awry, Marshalsea prison awaits. Can Stephen Maturin rescue his friend from a politically motivated trial and the enormity of being stricken from the Navy Lists? When the world has turned its back against you, friendship is all.

Es el amanecer del siglo XIX; Gran Bretaña está en guerra con la Francia de Napoleón. Jack Aubrey, un joven teniente de la marina de Nelson, es ascendido al mando de H.M.S. Sophie, un viejo y lento calabozo que es poco probable que haga su fortuna. Pero el capitán Aubrey es un marinero valiente y talentoso, su sed de aventura y victoria inmensa.

Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island in the Dutch East Indies as the Napoleonic Wars rage on, circumstances look far from promising for Captain Jack Aubrey and his crew. And yet, having overcome the odds and contrived their escape, still further peril awaits in the fiercely tidal waters of the Salibu Passage and the penal settlements of New South Wales.

As war with Napoleon seemingly draws to a close, opportunities for advancement are limited and Jack Aubrey faces the ultimate indignity – the possibility of being ‘yellowed’, or retired, and set aside with no squadron of his own. But the blockade of Brest presents dangers to equal those of the furthest shores.

As Captain Jack Aubrey cools his heels in a Maltese harbour, awaiting repairs to his ship, war rages on. Fearing that hostilities will end before he has any further opportunities for fame and fortune, Aubrey accepts several secret missions, but all is not as it seems.

"You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island.

John Aubrey Pugh, an Oxford don who has given up his teaching post and come to live in a secluded Welsh valley, falls in love with Bronwen Vaughan, the wife of a young farmer who is his neighbour. She is estranged from her husband, an admirable man in many ways, but one who has compelled her to submit to some brutal sexual perversion. When a famous preacher, whose advances Bronwen has rejected with contempt, persuades the entire community that she has committed adultery with Pugh, a reckoning is inevitable.

Three previously unpublished short stories by the great Patrick O'Brian - Noughts and Crosses, Two's Company and No Pirates Nowadays. Noughts and Crosses: When Sullivan and Ross decide to go shark fishing among the atolls of the Great Barrier Reef little do they know what awaits them. With their schooner beached for cleaning they take a small whaler out to sea, but when the very devil of a storm turns the whole of the sea white, it drives them to the nearest atoll for shelter.

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death - with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, time, and the nature of our surroundings. The stories in Storm have more to say than that. Deep Blue offers compelling tales of shipwrecks and salvage, submarine adventure and free diving, nautical survival and cannibalism.

El verdadero amor. La decimoquinta entrega de la muy afirmada serie de novelas de Aubrey Maturin de Patrick O'Brian está en partes iguales de misterio, aventura y drama psicológico. Un ballenero británico ha sido capturado por un ambicioso jefe en las islas de sándwiches en la instigación francesa, y el capitán Aubrey, R. N., es enviado con la sorpresa para restaurar el orden. Pero guardada en el nivel de cable es una convicta fugada. Para los oficiales, Clarissa Harvill es objeto de torpes cortesías y celos peligrosos.

La decimoséptima novela de la amplia serie de cuentos navales aubrey-maturin, que el New York Times Book Review ha descrito como "las mejores novelas históricas jamás escritas". Después de haber sobrevivido a una larga y desesperada aventura en el Gran Mar del Sur, el Capitán Jack Aubrey y Stephen Maturin regresan a Inglaterra a circunstancias muy diferentes.

El capitán Jack Aubrey está en tierra con medio sueldo sin mando, hasta que Stephen Maturin llega con órdenes secretas para que Aubrey lleve una fragata al Cabo de buena Esperanza bajo el banderín de un comodoro, allí para montar una expedición contra las islas francesas de Mauricio y La Reunión. Pero las dificultades para llevar a cabo sus órdenes se agravan por dos de sus propios capitanes: Lord Clonfert, un diletante que busca placer, y el capitán Corbett, cuya severidad empuja a su tripulación al borde del motín.

Napoleón ha sido derrotado en Waterloo, y la paz subsiguiente trae consigo tanto la deserción de casi la mitad de la tripulación del capitán Aubrey como la repentina atenuación de las perspectivas profesionales de Aubrey en una marina en tiempos de paz. Cuando la Sorpresa está casi hundida en su camino a Sudamérica -donde Aubrey y Stephen Maturin van a ayudar a Chile a afirmar su independencia de España-, el retraso provocado por las reparaciones cosecha una cosecha de consecuencias extrañas.

La emoción continúa en Post Captain, la segunda entrega de la aclamada serie "Aubrey-Maturin" de Patrick O'Brian, después de "Master" and "Commander". En 1803, Napoleón destroza la Paz de Amiens, y el capitán Jack Aubrey, refugiándose en Francia de sus acreedores, está internado.