Restoration (Rose Tremain) Books in Order

The Restoration books follow the fortunes of Robert Merivel, a delightfully flawed physician whose life keeps looping back to the glitter and danger of seventeenth-century courts. Read together, Restoration and Merivel trace his journey from self‑absorbed hanger‑on to a man battered into something like wisdom.

In the first novel, Merivel starts as a medical student more interested in feasting than anatomy. A chance success with one of King Charles II’s beloved spaniels propels him into royal favour. Soon he is installed as the king’s creature: rewarded with an estate at Bidnold in Norfolk and married, in name only, to Celia, one of the king’s mistresses, so that the king can visit her in secret.

Merivel’s job is to enjoy himself, and for a while he does exactly that. At Bidnold he wastes his days on painting, music and gluttony, preferring dogs and wine to patients. But his careless desire for Celia, and the envy of others at court, bring about a spectacular fall from grace. Cast out from Bidnold and cut off from the king, he fetches up at New Bedlam, a Quaker-run hospital for the mad, where he tries, not always successfully, to remember why he trained as a doctor in the first place.

From there the story pushes him through some of the great crises of Restoration London: plague, fire, loss and sudden acts of courage. Forced to confront suffering rather than sidestep it, Merivel begins to see how narrow his life has been. By the end of Restoration he has regained a measure of security, but Tremain leaves him marked by grief and far more conscious of his own failings.

Merivel: A Man of His Time picks up years later. Now in late middle age, Merivel lives back at Bidnold with his adored daughter Margaret, uneasy in his comfort and keenly aware that time is running out. Restlessness sends him abroad to the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, where the theatrical excess of French absolutism makes even Charles II’s court look restrained.

From Versailles he travels on to a remote Swiss refuge, encounters illness and disappointment and is repeatedly reminded that his appetites and charm no longer smooth every path. News from England, and from Margaret, forces him home again, where he must face sickness, political unease and the looming end of both the king’s reign and his own story.

Across the two books Tremain blends bawdy comedy, period detail and a quiet seriousness about what it means to live well. Merivel is vain, greedy and often foolish, but also open-hearted, capable of change and painfully aware of his own cowardice. The series offers a richly textured picture of Restoration society from royal palaces to hospitals and farmsteads, always seen through his candid, self-mocking gaze.

You can read either novel on its own, but taken in order they give a full arc: the rise, fall and late flowering of a man who keeps trying, and sometimes failing, to be better than his time expects.