The Ebb Tide (1894) - Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne

Category: Classic, Humor, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: Classics

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne
Read by Barnaby Edwards
Format: M4B
Bitrate: Variable
Unabridged

The Ebb-Tide
By: Robert Louis Stevenson
Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 28-03-2013
Language: English
Publisher: Audible Studios

The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette is one of three collaborative literary efforts between Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. Together the two men traveled the South Seas, so it only makes sense that they would put their heads together to write a novel that begins in Tahiti.

Stage, screen, and audio actor Barnaby Edwards voices the sailors and champagne merchants who make up this entertaining tale that takes its protagonists across the Pacific. The wonderful turn-of-the-century seafaring slang is delightful to hear, especially when Edwards intones a Cockney beggar who spends much of his time on the ocean extremely intoxicated.

Publisher’s Summary
Emma, I have scratched out the beginning to my father, for I think I can write more easily to you. This is my last farewell to all, the last you will ever hear or see of an unworthy friend and son. I have failed in life; I am quite broken down and disgraced. I pass under a false name; you will have to tell my father that with all your kindness. It is my own fault. — with Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the son of an engineer. He briefly studied engineering, then law, and contributed to university magazines while a student. Despite life-long poor health, he was an enthusiastic traveller, writing about European travels in the late 1870s and marrying in America in 1879. He contributed to various periodicals, writing first essays and later fiction. His first novel was Treasure Island in 1883, intended for his stepson, who collaborated with Stevenson on two later novels. Some of Stevenson’s subsequent novels are insubstantial popular romances, but others possess a deepening psychological intensity. He also wrote a handful of plays in collaboration with W.E. Henley. In 1888, he left England for his health, and never returned, eventually settling in Samoa after travelling in the Pacific islands. His time here was one of relatively good health and considerable writing, as well as of deepening concern for the Polynesian islanders under European exploitation, expressed in fictional and factual writing from his final years, some of which was so contrary to contemporary culture that a full text remained unavailable until well after Stevenson’s death. R. L. Stevenson died of a brain haemorrhage in 1894.

©2013 Robert Louis Stevenson (P)2013 Audible Ltd