Cherry and Violet

1666 London is a city in agony. The plague has arrived, spreading through teeming streets and crowded tenements, and two young women, Cherry and her companion Violet, find their world collapsing around them. Drawing on the vivid firsthand account of Samuel Pepys, Anne Manning renders the horror of that annus horribilis with startling immediacy: the abandoned streets, the death carts, the terrible mathematics of contagion. But this is not merely a plague narrative. As the city burns in the Great Fire that follows, Cherry and Violet are carried to a country house in Berkshire, where the pastoral quiet offers both refuge and reflection. What they discover there, about loss, about resilience, about the fragility of the life they knew, forms the emotional heart of this almost-forgotten Victorian gem. Manning writes with the intimate detail of someone who understands that history is not just dates and events, but ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances.