Patrick O'Brian has 33 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 16 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 978 ratings. The most-rated is Master and Commander.
Master and Commander
Summary
Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors: his depiction of the detail of life aboard an early 19th century man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience, of the landscape and of the sea. O’Brian’s portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute. His power of characterisation is above all masterly. Ric Jerrom reads this classic sea story from Patrick O’Brien.
©2014 Audible, Inc.; 1970 The Estate of the late Patrick O’Brien CBE
Post Captain
Summary
This tale begins with Jack Aubrey arriving home from his exploits in the Mediterranean to find England at peace following the Treaty of Amiens. He and his friend Stephen Maturin, surgeon and secret agent, begin to live the lives of country gentlemen, hunting, entertaining, and enjoying amorous adventures. Their comfortable existence, however, is cut short when Jack is overnight reduced to a pauper with enough debts to keep him in prison for life. He flees to the continent to seek refuge. Instead he finds himself a hunted fugitive as Napoleon has ordered the internment of all Englishmen in France. Patrick O'Brian is regarded by many as the greatest historical novelist of the 20th century. Post Captain is the second novel in his remarkable Aubrey/Maturin series.
©1972 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Shadow Wand
Summary
Her world-altering secret can’t be hidden much longer. Elloren Gardner hides the most powerful secret in all Erthia - she is the Black Witch of Prophecy and destined to triumph...or be used as the ultimate weapon of destruction. Separated from everyone she loves, isolated and hunted, Elloren must turn to the last person she can trust - her fastmate, Commander Lukas Grey. With the Mage forces of Gardneria poised to conquer all of Erthia, Elloren has no choice but to ally with Lukas and combine their power to keep herself out of the hands of Gardnerian leader Marcus Vogel...the holder of the all-consuming Shadow Wand. With just weeks to train to become a warrior, and no control over her magic, Elloren finds unexpected allies among those under orders to kill her. It’s time to step up. To fight back. And to forge onward through the most devastating loss yet.
©2020 Laurie Forest (P)2020 HarperAudio
H.M.S. Surprise
Summary
H.M.S. Surprise, the third in O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin series, follows the variable fortunes of Captain Jack Aubrey's career in Nelson's navy, as he attempts to hold his ground against admirals, colleagues, and the enemy, and accepts a commission to convey a British ambassador to the East Indies. The voyage leads him and his friend Stephen Maturin to the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and through the archipelago of Spice Islands where the French have a near-overwhelming local superiority. Rarely has a novel managed to convey more vividly the fragility of a sailing ship in a wild sea. Rarely has a historical novelist combined action and lyricism of style in the way that O'Brian does. His superb sense of place, brilliant characterisation and a vigour and joy of writing lifts O'Brian above other writers in this genre.
©1973 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Shadowbreaker
Summary
A Deathwatch novel. Talon Squad return to action, hunting for a missing inquisitor on a world that has been claimed by the T'au Empire - but has their quarry been taken or defected to the Greater Good? Listen to it because: It's the long-awaited sequel to Deathwatch and is packed with the high-octane alien-hunting action you've come to expect from Steve Parker. The story: The Deathwatch are the elite of the elite - small teams of Space Marines handpicked for special missions that require the utmost courage and cunning. Now recovered from the injuries sustained on his previous mission, Codicier Karras must lead Talon Squad in the hunt for a missing inquisitor. Their only clue is the name of an Imperial planet that has been taken over by the T’au. Is the missing inquisitor alive or dead? Worse still, has she gone rogue, jeopardising one of the Inquisition’s most secret projects? Karras must lead his team against a whole planet of hostile T’au and survive the deadly internal politics of the Inquisition to succeed in his mission, code named Shadowbreaker. Action, intrigue and excitement are seamlessly woven together by the master of high-octane science fiction, Steve Parker. Written by Steve Parker. Audiobook running time 16 hours and 37 minutes. Narrated by Andrew Wincott.
©2019 Games Workshop Limited (P)2019 Games Workshop Limited
The Mauritius Command
Summary
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, O'Brien's attention to the detail of early 19th-century life ashore and at sea is meticulous. This tale is as beautifully written and as gripping as any in the series; it also stands on its own as a superlative work of fiction.
©1977 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Master and Commander
Summary
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.
©1984 Patrick O'Brian (P)2003 Recorded Books, LLC.
Desolation Island
Summary
Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon Stephen Maturin sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy - and a dangerous disease which decimates the crew.
©1978 The Estate of the late Patrick O'Brian CBE (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Fortune of War
Summary
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 despatch 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.
©1979 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Ionian Mission
Summary
Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans of many battles, return in this novel to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But Jack is now a senior captain, commanding a line-of-battle ship sent out to reinforce the squadron blockading Toulon, and this is a longer, harder, colder war than the dashing frigate action of his early days.... A sudden turn of events takes him and Stephen off on a hazardous mission to the Greek islands. All his old skills of seamanship - and luck when fighting against odds - come triumphantly into their own as the story concludes with some fierce and thrilling action.
©1981 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Surgeon's Mate
Summary
Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by despatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attentions of two privateers soon become menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as thrilling, as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O'Brian has written. Then, among other things, follows a shipwreck and a particularly sinister internment in the notorious Temple Prison in Paris. Once again, the tigerish and fascinating Diana Villiers redresses the balance in this man's world of seamanship and war.
©1981 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Far Side of the World
Summary
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. But Aubrey has to cope with a succession of disasters - men overboard, castaways, encounters with savages, storms, typhoons, groundings, shipwrecks, to say nothing of murder and criminal insanity.
©1984 The Estate of the late Patrick O'Brian CBE (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Clarissa Oakes
Summary
Captain Jack Aubrey sails away from the hated Australian prison colonies in his favourite vessel the Surprise, pondering on middle age and sexual frustration. He soon becomes aware that he is out of touch with the mood of his ship: to his astonishment he finds that in spite of a lifetime's experience he does not know what the foremost hands or even his own officers are thinking. They know, as he does not, that the Surprise has a stranger aboard: and what they, for their part, do not know is that the stranger is potentially as dangerous as a light in the powder magazine itself.
©1992 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Nutmeg of Consolation
Summary
Shipwrecked on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies, Captain Aubrey, surgeon and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck. A vicious attack by Malay pirates is repulsed, but the makeshift vessel burns, and they are truly marooned. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the whimsy and ingenuity of Patrick O Brian or Stephen Maturin could devise. In command now of a new ship, the Nutmeg, Aubrey pursues his interrupted mission. The dreadful penal colony in New South Wales, harrowingly described, is the backdrop to a diplomatic crisis provoked by Maturin s Irish temper, and to a near-fatal encounter with the wildlife of the Australian outback.
©1989 The Estate of the late Patrick O'Brian CBE (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Hundred Days
Summary
Napoleon, escaped from Elba, pursues his enemies across Europe like a vengeful phoenix. If he can corner the British and Prussians before their Russian and Austrian allies arrive, his genius will lead the French armies to triumph at Waterloo. In the Balkans, preparing a thrust northwards into Central Europe to block the Russians and Austrians, a horde of Muslim mercenaries is gathering. They are inclined toward Napoleon because of his conversion to Islam during the Egyptian campaign, but they will not move without a shipment of gold ingots from Sheik Ibn Hazm which, according to British intelligence, is on its way via camel caravan to the coast of North Africa. It is this gold that Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin must at all costs intercept. The fate of Europe hinges on their desperate mission.
©1998 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible Studios
The Yellow Admiral
Summary
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; he is on even worse terms with his wife, Sophie, whose mother has ferreted out a most damaging trove of old personal letters. Even Jack's exploits at sea turn sour: in the storm waters off Brest he captures a French privateer laden with gold and ivory, but this at the expense of missing a signal and deserting his post. Worst of all, in the spring of 1814, peace breaks out, and this feeds into Jack's private fears for his career. Fortunately Jack is not left to his own devices. Stephen Maturin returns from a mission in France with the news that the Chileans, to secure their independence, require a navy, and the service of English officers. Jack is savoring this apparent reprieve for his career as well as Sophie's forgiveness,when he receives an urgent dispatch ordering him to Gibraltar: Napoleon has escaped from Elba.
©1996 Patrick O'Brian (P)2015 Audible, Ltd
The Reverse of the Medal
Summary
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?
©1986 Patrick O'Brien (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Letter of Marque
Summary
Captain Jack Aubrey, a brilliant and experienced officer, has been struck off the list of post-captains for a crime he did not commit. His old friend Stephen Maturin, usually cast as a ship's surgeon to mask his discreet activities on behalf of British intelligence, has bought for Aubrey his former ship the Surprise to command as a privateer, more politely termed a letter of marque. Together they sail on a desperate mission against the French, which, if successful, may redeem Aubrey from the private hell of his disgrace.
©1988 The Estate of the late Patrick O'Brian CBE (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Thirteen-Gun Salute
Summary
For all of Jack Aubrey's life he has triumphed, often sensationally, over the dangers of the sea and the violence of the enemy. But his rashness and his indiscretion have time and time again enabled his rivals to prevent him reaping his just rewards. The nadir was reached in The Reverse of the Medal when, the victim of a skilful frame-up, he was convicted of fraud and struck off the Navy list just as he was coming within sight of flag rank. The subsequent exposure of the conspiracy, coupled with his brilliant success in command of a privateer, had brought him to a position where Their Lordships were more or less bound to reinstate him. This, as the present story opens, they have done, and he 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....
©1989 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Treason's Harbour
Summary
While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assumes the centre 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. All of Patrick O'Brian's strengths are on parade in this novel of action and intrigue, set partly in Malta, partly in the treacherous, pirate-infested waters of the Red Sea.
©1983 The Estate of the late Patrick O'Brian CBE (P)2014 Audible, Inc.