In 1663, London is a city of astonishing contradictions: a monarch restored to his throne, a navy preparing for war with the Dutch, and a population still reeling from civil war. Into this volatile world steps Samuel Pepys, a young naval administrator with a gift for seeing everything, the extraordinary and the embarrassingly mundane. His diary captures the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and the Dutch War as they unfold, but what makes these pages indispensable is what Pepys cannot stop recording: his own anxieties, his petty jealousies, his theatrical gossip, his wife's mounting frustration, and his endless fascination with the women he encounters. This is not history from on high. It is history from within a restless, ambitious, frequently shameless human heart. Pepys writes with a candid urgency that feels almost modern, confessing his failures in the same breath as he records the fall of kingdoms. Three centuries later, his diary remains the most vivid portrait we have of seventeenth-century England, and the most irresistible.
