With each new book, Jane Stevenson's incomparable fiction gains increasing recognition. The Winter Queen, the first volume in her masterly historical trilogy, told of the clandestine passion of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Pelagius, an African prince and former slave. Balthasar Stuart, the child born of their love, is the protagonist of The Shadow King. Now a young doctor in late-seventeenth-century Holland, he struggles to come to terms with his rich, difficult, and complex heritage. Neither black nor white, royal nor commoner, African nor European, he is truly at home nowhere in the world. Race and identity -- great human themes, great American themes -- are at the heart of this extraordinary novel. Driven out of Holland by the plague, Balthasar makes his way first to the raffish, cynical world of Restoration London and then to Barbados, a land of slavery and savage racism. Every stage of his life is informed by the political and religious background of the era. The past is vividly alive: how people thought and spoke, their food, their fashions, their medical practices. Once again, readers can rejoice in the powerful imagination, formidable intellect, and radiant language of a writer often compared to Penelope Fitzgerald and A. S. Byatt.