Outlander

Outlander, Diana Gabaldon, 627 pages

Claire Beauchamp Randall and her husband, Frank, are on a second honeymoon celebrating the end of the Second World War. Her duties as a nurse and his as a spy have kept them apart for years, so they return to the place they were married, the Scottish highlands, to become familiar with each other again. But Claire, out on an herb-gathering expedition by herself one morning, stumbles through a portal to the past – 200 years earlier, on the eve of the second Jacobite rising. Her medical skills endear her to the Clan Mackenzie, and she becomes friends with Jamie Fraser, an outlaw in hiding from the occupying British forces, after treating his injuries at their hands. But as the British army closes in, led by Frank’s ancestor, the sadistic Captain Jonathan Wolverton Randall, Claire and Jamie’s friendship becomes something more: a romance reaching across the centuries.

I’ve slowly been making my way through the Starz adaptation of Outlander, and I knew I had to read the series before getting too far ahead of myself (I did the same thing with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones). This era of history isn’t one I’m particularly familiar with (I enjoyed watching the Starz series Black Sails because I have a wealth of knowledge about the Golden Age of Piracy and the history of sailing), but Gabaldon fills her book with such intricate detail of the life of a 18^th-century Scot that it’s easy to become immersed in the world she paints. Just like Claire, the modern reader will struggle with some culture shock – the casual acceptance of physical abuse of children and women is particularly jarring, as well as the repeated threats of sexual violence. However, Gabaldon intersperses the unpleasant scenes with depictions of the more enjoyable aspects of Renaissance life. Poignant, comical, brutal, and passionate in turn, Outlander is a must-read for lovers of historical fiction or romance.