Master and Commander (Aubrey-Maturin)

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.

Patrick O'Brian's many novels include Testimonies, The Golden Ocean, and The Unknown Shore, in addition to twenty volumes in the highly respected Aubrey/Maturin series. O'Brian wrote acclaimed biographies of Pablo Picasso and Sir Joseph Banks and translated many works from the French, among them the novels and memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Lacouture's biography of Charles de Gaulle. Mr. O'Brian died in January 2000.