Dragonfly in Amber

Dragonfly in Amber is a novel by the American writer Diana Gabaldon, published in 1992. It is the second book of the Outlander series.

The novel opens in the twentieth century with Claire returning to the Scottish Highlands with her daughter Brianna, and then goes back to the events that took her there in the first place. In the eighteenth century she and Jamie Fraser attempt to stop the rising that will end at Culloden in 1746, working through the Jacobite court in Paris and the politics of the Scottish clans, because Claire knows from her own time what the battle will do to the Highlands. The book is built on the tension between what she knows and what she can change, and it deals with the consequences of that attempt on the people around them. Gabaldon mixes the historical record with a small amount of time travel and a great deal of domestic detail.

The series followed the two of them across further volumes and generations, and this book is the one in which the historical disaster at the centre of the story is first confronted directly.