Seventeenth century royal-in-exile Elizabeth of Bohemia pursues a clandestine relationship with an African prince against the politically unstable and war-threatened climate of the period.

In The Shadow King, Jane Stevenson illuminates the world of the intriguing Balthasar Stuart, the secret biracial child born of the illicit love between a queen of Bohemia and an exiled African prince. A gifted young doctor in the late seventeenth century, Balthasar struggles with very contemporary issues of identity, brought into play by his difficult heritage. Driven out of Holland by the plague, he makes his way first to the raffish, cynical world of Restoration London, where he encounters Aphra Behn, the English spy and sometimes playwright. He leaves to seek prosperity in colonial Barbados, a society marked by slavery and savage racism. Utterly absorbing and deeply perceptive, The Shadow King brings the past radiantly to life in people's habits of speech, their food and fashions, and their medical practices.

This is a novel of many an interracial love story that is also a scholarly detective tale. A young Oxford don named Michael Foxwist and a group of his academic friends come upon a collection of dusty old documents; they are intrigued to learn of the clandestine seventeenth-century marriage of the black prince Pelagius and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. With mounting excitement, they discover that the true queen of England may not be the familiar dowdy elderly woman of German extraction but a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind. She lives in Barbados and is the last surviving descendant of Elizabeth and Pelagius. Michael confronts her with her heritage only to find that she refuses to be the child of destiny and insists on being herself. But their meeting changes everything - they fall in love. Of different race, nationality, and temperament, they must re-examine all their assumptions and the terms on which they live. Though written to be read independently, The Empress of the Last Days is also the conclusion to Jane Stevenson's acclaimed historical trilogy, companion to The Winter Queen and The Shadow King.