» Mystery. Love. Time travel – Jamie and Clare return in the decadently good OutlanderThe Booktopian

With season 2 of Outlander premiering this Sunday on SoHo, there’s no better time to start reading (or re-reading!) the series. Whether you’re interested in history, warfare, sex, violence, betrayal, vengeance, time travel, romance, horror – these books have it all!

(Did you know that one of the books actually beat George R.R. Martin and Stephen King for a Quill Award in 2006?!)

If you’re new to the series, start with Outlander. It’s 1945 and nurse Claire Randall is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon in Scotland. Innocently she walks through a stone circle in the Highlands, and finds herself in a violent skirmish taking place in 1743. Suddenly she is a Sassenach, an outlander, in a country torn by war and by clan feuds. Meeting Jamie introduces her to a passion so fierce and a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire, and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.

In Dragonfly in Amber (book 2), Claire Randall returns with her grown daughter to the majesty of Scotland’s mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones, about a love that transcends the boundaries of time, and about James Fraser, a warrior whose gallantry once drew the young Claire from the security of her century to the dangers of his.

Get reading before the TV series starts again!