"O'Brian's books are as atypical of conventional sea stories as Conrad's.
Like John le Carr, he has erased the boundary separating a debased genre from 'serious'
fiction. O'Brian is a novelist, pure and simple, one of the best we have."
Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Patrick O'Brian is one author who can put a spark of character into the sawdust of time,
and The Ionian Mission is another rattling good yarn."Observer

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans now 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 in the Royal Navy's blockade of Toulon, and this is a
longer, harder, colder war than the dashing frigate actions of his early days. A sudden turn
of events takes him and Stephen off on a hazardous mission to the Greek Islands, where
all his old skills of seamanship and his proverbial luck when fighting against odds come
triumphantly into their own.

Earphones Awards recipient Simon Vance was born in England and worked for the BBC for ten years as a radio news announcer and as a narrator for the Royal National Institute for the Blind in London. Besides narrating audiobooks, he is involved in numerous stage-acting projects in the United States and Europe.