May-June 1666. The Second Anglo-Dutch War grinds on, and Samuel Pepys is drowning in it. As clerk of the Acts at the Navy Board, he wrestles with victualling contracts, worries over fleet dispatches, and watches the political machinery of Charles II's court grind forward. But the real drama lives in the margins of his days: his daughter falls ill, his wife storms out over household finances and her insistence on painting lessons, and Pepys himself spirals through waves of anxiety about his health, his career, his soul. These are not the entries that will document September's fire, but they capture something just as precious: the ordinary texture of a city teetering toward catastrophe, seen through the eyes of a man who cannot stop watching, recording, wanting. Pepys is vain, obsessive, occasionally cruel, and utterly indispensable. His diary is 17th-century London breathing.
