Restoration (Tremain)

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 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.

Restoration is a panoramic novel of life in 17th-century England, from the restoration of vitality to the empire after the onslaughts of the London fire and the plague, to the restoration of purpose and wakefulness in the life of Robert Merivel, who places his faith in the greatest symbol of a forward-moving era-the King.