Waverley; Or, 'tis Sixty Years Since — Complete

Waverley invented the historical novel. Before Walter Scott, no one thought to dramatize the past through the eyes of an ordinary person swept up in events far larger than themselves. This is the pioneering work that birthed an entire genre, influencing everyone from Dumas to Tolstoy, and it remains astonishingly alive two centuries later. Edward Waverley is a young English soldier stationed in Scotland whose idle curiosity and romantic temperament lead him into the heart of the 1745 Jacobite Rising. The son of a Whig father and a Tory uncle, Edward carries England's contradictions within him. Drawn to the honor and wild beauty of the Highland clans who take him in, he finds himself torn between duty to his king and loyalty to men who have become his friends. What follows is his education in the costs of loyalty, the seductions of idealism, and the brutal mathematics of civil war. Scott renders a Scotland on the verge of rebellion with incomparable richness, painting a world where sword and slogan carry equal weight, and where one young man's coming of age becomes a meditation on what it means to belong.