Restoration also inspired an Oscar-winning 1995 film adaptation, starring Robert Downey Jr and Ian McKellen.
Her celebrated novel Restoration (1989) portrayed the decadent reign of Charles II – and the misadventures of her rambunctious anti-hero Robert Merivel – as a response to 1980s Western materialism. This isn’t the first time that Tremain has merged modern commentary and period detail. “Having written Islands Of Mercy,” she continues, referring to her previous novel, which transported the reader from Bath to Borneo in the 19th-century, “I also had a head-full of research on Victorian society the plight of children in that era and the awful deprivation suffered by the poor seemed to be something that tallied with this.” Lily’s story is one of fleeting kindness, institutional cruelty, breathless possibilities, and – as a young woman reunited with Sam – volatile desires it is also, as the book’s subtitle notes: a tale of revenge.
Abandoned by her mother in a London park in 1850, newborn Lily is saved by young policeman Sam Trench, who carries her to the city’s Foundling Hospital (built in real life by 18th-century philanthropist Thomas Coram). The fate of Lily, the focal character of Rose Tremain’s latest novel, seems precarious from her earliest hours.
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