cover image Circle of Pearls

Circle of Pearls

Rosalind Laker. Doubleday Books, $19.95 (519pp) ISBN 978-0-385-26305-4

As British writer Laker's To Dance with Kings illuminated court life in Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV, her latest work strikingly depicts 17th- and 18th-century England during the Cromwell interregnum and the Restoration. And as her earlier heroine was a practitioner of the art of fan-making, the protagonist of this engaging historical novel starts a cottage industry of ribbon embroidery after Cromwell and his Puritan regime are succeeded by luxury-loving Charles II. Through her account of the fortunes of a Royalist family, the Pallisters of Sotherleigh manor in Sussex, Laker animates the civil strife that set Cavaliers versus Roundheads, neighbor against neighbor. Julia Pallister is fated to love two men: her brother's Oxford friend Christopher Wren, and Adam Warrender, the Puritan scion of the adjoining estate. Hot-tempered, impetuous Julia, whose traits betray her into regrettable situations, is an appealing character. If her plotting is cliched and overly sentimental, Laker's well-integrated research (details of political turmoil and domestic customs, of the Great Plague and the Fire of London) make up for the sometimes cloying love story. (July)