"This is the story of Richard Temple – prisoner of war, sometime adventurer, lover and artist – told with insight, empathy and drama by one of the world's master storytellers.
Captive in a brutal German prison towards the end of World War II, Richard Temple has been stripped of everything that once defined him: pride, courage, his very identity have all been surrendered in a desperate bid to protect his secrets from the Nazis.
But with the real Richard Temple suppressed to the point of near-extinction, a sudden respite in his torture allows him a moment of rare release, when he can lower his guard and remember who he is. Huddled in his cell, too badly beaten to move, the action of the novel takes place in the Richard’s mind as he retraces a convoluted course from an unhappy childhood, through a vague and uncertain adolescence to a complex, compromised adulthood, shot through with artistic sensibility and the myriad impulses that make a man.
Patrick O'Brian's signature combination of narrative flair, intuitive sympathy and psychological insight make this a fascinating exploration of how passive resistance can be a form of courage and what it truly means to be a hero."
"The life of the world’s greatest modern artist by one of Britain’s greatest artists.
'Positive, original, diverting and highly effective.’ – Sunday Times
‘This biography achieves that rare distinction of never having a dull page.’ – Independent on Sunday
Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. His appetitel for sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedy and tragedy, are legendary. No artist of the first rank has been so aw-inspiringly productive. No artist of any rank has made so much money. A few artists have rivalled his life-span of ninety years, but none has attracted so insatiable a public interest.
Patrick O’Brian, author of the famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, was a near neighbour of Picasso’s in the south of France for many years and knew him well. His much admired biography gives full weight to hte distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso’s character and art. The man that emerges from teh pages of this scholarly and passionate biography is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private despite his relish of fame. A man who, despite the professed communism of his later years, in O’Brian’s view, retained to the end of his life a residual Catholic mentality.
This biography is presented in its original form and may depict language, prejudices and insensitivities that were commonplace at the time it was written. The views expressed in this text do not reflect the opinions of the publisher or the narrator."
"Botanist, explorer, President of the Royal Society and one of Australia’s founding fathers.
Sir Joseph Banks was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a young man he accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage of discovery to Australia, in later years he was instrumental in establishing Kew Gardens as the greatest botanical centre in the world and he knew just about everybody who mattered in the scientific circles of the time.
Patrick O'Brian's masterly biography draws on much hitherto unpublished material. Far from being the colossus of science traditionally imagined, Joseph Banks emerges here as a warm-hearted enthusiast whose legacy survives not only in the record of his botanizing in the South Seas but in the development of the Australian continent and in the tenor and tradition of subsequent scientific inquiry."
"For the first time on audio, the deeply personal and ingenious first novel written under Patrick O’Brian’s own name.
THREE BEAR WITNESS
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, and the ill-fated consequences of their actions are recounted in the testimonies of Bronwen, Pugh and the preacher’s cousin, Mr Lloyd.
Patrick O’Brian is world famous for his novels of nautical high adventure, but twenty years before readers were first introduced to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, he wrote this intensely felt and evocative tale set in the beautiful but often unforgiving
Welsh landscape he knew so well. With all the freshness and immediacy that have become hallmarks of O’Brian’s style, he conveys the hopes and fears, and tragedy, of his characters, demonstrating the flair and sheer humanity that have made him one of the twentieth century’s literary greats."
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