Restoration

In 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians have to perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, he understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states are waging war to the death.

This is the summer that Lewis Little, precocious thirteen-year-old, is spending in Paris with his mother, Alice. Alice is translating the latest medieval romance by Valentina Gavrilovich, the bestselling and exotic Russian emigre. As Valentina slowly casts a spell over Lewis, he is driven on a terrifying quest.

Abandoned, pregnant and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St Clare uses her wits, beauty and courage to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England, favourite mistress of Charles II.

Dispossessed of crown and kingdom, the young Charles II is forced to flee for his life. Out of the heat of the battle, the outlaw King and his tiny party must journey across Cromwell's England to a Channel port and a ship bound for France and safety. But the king, with his love of adventure, his humour and his looks, is no easy man to hide.

Spanning his life both before and after the Restoration, Antonia Fraser's biography captures all the vitality of the man and the expansiveness of the age.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'March' and 'People of the Book'. A young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly struck a small Derbyshire village.

An intellectual thriller set in the Oxford of the 1660s, a time of great ferment - intellectual, religious and political. The action takes place around the suspicious death of Robert Grove, a Fellow of New College.

Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from Norfolk to New Zealand in search of new beginnings and prosperity. But the harsh land near Christchurch where they settle threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek he is seized by an obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth.

*A wonderful bittersweet story about a misguided do- gooder

A new novel based on the true story of the 18th century Irish giant, Charles O'Brien, who was exhibited in London and eventually dissected by the surgeon Charles Hunter. His bones still hang in the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields.