Restoration

Robert Merivel, son of a glove maker and an aspiring physician, finds his fortunes transformed when he is given a position at the court of King Charles II. Merivel slips easily into a life of luxury and idleness, enthusiastically enjoying the women and wine of the vibrant Restoration age. But when he’s called on to serve the king in an unusual role, he transgresses the one law that he is forbidden to break and is brutally cast out from his newfound paradise. Thus begins Merivel’s journey to self-knowledge, which will take him down into the lowest depths of seventeenth-century society.

The Booker shortlisted novel that “restored the historical novel to its rightful place of honor” (New York Times).

Rose Tremain is the author of fifteen works of fiction, which have been published in twenty-seven countries. These include Trespass, longlisted for the Booker Prize; Sacred Country, winner of the Prix Femina Etranger in France; The Road Home, winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction; and Restoration, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, filmed in 1995, and presented as a stage play in 2009. Tremain lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes.