Read by Simon Vance, now there's a guarantee that you'll enjoy listening to it, regardless of what 'it' is, but this audacious mix of Patrick O'Brian, Susanna Clarke and some unpsecified author who wrote lots about dragons, sorry I've never read anything like that, oddly enough, with dragons added to the Napoleonic War, sounds daft, but works indredibly well. It helps that the author takes great care with the language of her characters as well as developing rather touching relationships, such that it's horribly alarming when these loveable vulnerable massive warmonsters and their affectionate ruthless mass-murdering pilots go into battle, even though I'm sneakily root for the French, though in all sorts of ways they're not that much better than the Brits, Empire-wise, they did at least send us a platoon in 1798 for all that in the end they got paroled and we got fucking slaughtered. I refer you to my review of The Year Of The French. If the Brits had dragons in Ireland they'd have started doing that 'throw prisoners out of helicopters thing' a few centuries earlier, only with dragons, who would have also eaten the prisoners. No! Honestly, I really liked this, it was great, I love the Aubrey Maturin books too, but come on, I'm never going to fall too much in love with any arm of the British armed forces in any era. But this was great