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    The Hundred Days
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    The Hundred Days
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    The Hundred Days
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    The Hundred Days

    Written by Patrick O’Brian

    Narrated by Robert Hardy

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Napoleon has escaped from Elba – the Hundred Days have begun.

    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.

    All is to play for and everything is at stake.

    ‘Patrick O’Brian is far and away the best of the Napoleonic story tellers, and The Hundred Days is one of the best in the series; a classic naval adventure, crammed with incident, superbly plotted and utterly gripping.’
    BERNARD CORNWELL

    ‘Patrick O’Brian is a joy to read.’
    Irish Independent

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 15, 2005
    ISBN9780007217410
    Unavailable
    The Hundred Days
    Author

    Patrick O’Brian

    Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel long Aubrey–Maturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.

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    Reviews for The Hundred Days

    4/5

    406 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      With Napoleon back on the move, Jack is dispatched to prevent new naval allies from joining ranks with the enemies of Britain. Stephen is traveling with him, of course, still recovering from the loss of his beloved wife Diana. This book sees Stephen shooting lions in Algeria and rescuing two little lost Irish children from the slave markets. Meanwhile, Jack is hot on the trail of a galley full of gold. He must stop it from delivering it's payload to Napoleon.
    • 5/5
      A tale of desolation imitating the authors own personal grief and of facing his own mortality. The series on whole is very subdued on sudden deaths and never lowers itself to mere gratuitous melodramatics. A very big moment in the Canon and a very important prequel to the final full story! Highly Recommended
      10Xs on the Special Agent Fox Mulder scale.
      1X is Meandering Waffle
      5X Listenable Just
      10X Ear and Mind Gold
    • 4/5
      A re-read as I'd originally read this hopelessly out of sync and the Aubrey/Maturin series does carry over from one book to another, it is a series best read in sync. Another typically excellent yarn in the series, excellent characterization, vivid prose, realistic action and inaction.
    • 5/5
      The Hundred Days, Patrick O’Brian’s nineteenth book in his Aubrey-Maturin series, picks up shortly after the events of The Yellow Admiral, with Napoleon having escaped from his exile on Elba. On land, the Allies are joining to stop Napoleon, but the Austrian and Russian forces are blocked partly by geography and partly through mutual distrust. In order to drive them apart, Napoleon has reached out to Muslim forces in North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, seeking funds to hire Assassins as mercenaries. He also works to rebuild his fleet in order to challenge those forces loyal to Louis XVIII.As the story begins, Dr. Stephen Maturin had briefly left the squadron to bury his wife, Diana, after she died in a carriage accident. O’Brian had foreshadowed this in The Yellow Admiral, but it still feels shocking to have so familiar a character die. Maturin throws himself into his intelligence work, relishing the opportunity to stop Napoleon once and for all. Admiral Lord Keith gives Commodore Jack Aubrey new orders to stop the gold from making its way to Napoleon and to convince any French captains he meets to join the side of Louis XVIII. Along with the expected sea maneuvers, O’Brian further examines the nature of luck as Killick accidentally breaks Maturin’s narwhal horn, which the crew held to bring the luck of a unicorn horn. Maturin himself is full in his grief, seeming at times a different character, but the regularity of sea life helps him to find some familiarity in which to recover.By land, O’Brian uses Maturin to examine the different loyalties of the Muslim leaders regarding the Sunni-Shiite divide and how Napoleon worked to take advantage of it to gain allies, while a trip to meet the local Dey, Omar Pasha, provides some land-based action. Maturin studies the local fauna, gains the necessary intelligence, but worries if it will be actionable when a sirocco wind coming off the land delays either the Surprise or its tender, the Ringle, from returning for him. Fortunately, he makes it in time and brings Aubrey the intelligence and they make a plan to intercept a xebec carrying the gold in the Strait of Gibraltar. The battle goes on for days with Barrett Bonden dying in the first blow, adding yet another shocking death as Bonden had been with Jack’s crew since the first book, Master and Commander. The Surprise and her crew manage to capture the xebec and all its gold, learning on their return to Gibraltar that Napoleon was defeated in the Low Countries and the war is over. Jack now heads off on his mission to Chile.With The Hundred Days, O’Brian brings the Napoleonic Wars to a close. The series began during the War of the Second Coalition, a war many of the European monarchies fought against revolutionary France, which in turn led to the War of the Third Coalition under Napoleon, who also fought the Wars of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Coalitions. O’Brian uses Aubrey to comment on the fact that the period was marked by twenty years of almost constant war with few interruptions. He also demonstrates a great deal of narrative maturity in this novel, for while many members of Aubrey’s ships’ companies had died during the course of the series, the death of Diana and Bonden stand out for the large role they played in Aubrey and Maturin’s lives. The Hundred Days further offers a bit of a look back, with the crew visiting Gibraltar and Port Mahon in Minorca, showing what has changed or remained the same since the events of Master and Commander. This nineteenth novel is easily one of the strongest books in the Aubrey-Maturin series. This Folio Society edition reprints the original text with insets containing historical portraits and sketches to illustrate some of the scenes and maps of the Mediterranean coast on the endpapers.
    • 4/5
      Another wonderful book of Aubrey and Maturin. I hate that there is only one full story left in the series to read.
    • 3/5
      Not perhaps the best in the series, I'm afraid. The deaths of several long-important characters are just sort of lobbed in offhand, it seems like ... and much of the "hundred days" action is of course offstage. There are some lovely moments here, including Stephen's rescue of two Irish children, but this certainly wasn't one of my favorite volumes in the series.
    • 4/5
      More of a nautical romp than the last book, though not as light-hearted as some.
    • 5/5
      Another winner from O'Brian, which has Stephen adopting through purchasing as slaves two young Irish children. Other things I loved about this volume:

      -- how O'Brian shows that warfare is changing through preemptive strikes
      -- the thrilling lion hunt
      -- the precarious nature of being named a Dey in the Arab lands
      -- the importance of money in warfare, both in buying mercenaries, and in doling out prizes
      -- the politics of the admiralty, and how Jack gets lucky again
    • 5/5
      This is the is the next to last book in the series and it is a well written and interesting little tale. Technically there is another book after the next one but it was never completed.
    • 4/5
      Recounting the time period when Napoleon made his abortive attempt to recapture his glory as emperor, this novel finds Jack & Stephen doing their best to keep ships from joining Napoleon and stopping a major transfer of wealth. Mr. O'Brien continues his mastery of writing, juxtaposing such scenes as the cramped sick hold where a sailor recounts what brought him to the seas, immediately followed by a stretch of sea and scenery amazing to behold. There are some terribly sorrowful events recounted in this book - all occurring "off-stage" and leaving the reader to mourn on his own, accompanied only in the imagination of the reader by the characters chiefly concerned.
    • 1/5
      After enjoying the Yellow Admiral so very much....this book was quite a disappointment. So much so, that after leafing through #20 a bit, I decided not to spend any more time on it at all. Although I have not read O'Brian's biography, I suppose the death of his wife might have had something to do with his change in tone, and perhaps that's understandable...but still, I wish I hadn't read this one. I would have preferred to have my delight in the series remain unalloyed.
    • 4/5
      I understand the upset some people felt at the dramatic events dealt with "summarily" in this book. It's true . . . but O'Brian was often a bit elliptical in how he dealt with high drama--about some things he seemed to be a firm believer in "the less said the better"; and I suspect we'll read more of these events in the next book.I'd be curious as to why he made some of the choices he did in this book. This might inspire me to look at one of his bios.BUT all that said, O'Brian was still writing well here and I don't think this is so much a case of growing tired of his creations as wanting to settle some scores with the reader and some of his characters before the story ended.
    • 3/5
      Two sudden deaths of major characters dealt with summarily. hmmm. The lion hunt was good, tho.
    • 2/5
      Not O'Brian at his best, I fear, though I think there is a marked diminution in power after the Letter of Marque anyway. This one is rather going through the motions and the deaths of two major characters is dealt with in such an off-hand manner that it rather allows you a glimpse into O'Brian's reported personal coldness.