The Mississippi Bubble / How the Star of Good Fortune Rose and Set and Rose Again, by a Woman's Grace, for One John Law of Lauriston

The novel follows John Law, an ambitious and resourceful financier whose gambling, exile, and colonial ventures propel a speculative scheme that inflates into a vast Mississippi enterprise and then collapses, throwing investors into ruin. Told in three parts, the narrative moves from gambling-dominated English social circles through frontier episodes of capture, escape, and Indigenous diplomacy, and finally to metropolitan political maneuvering and the dramatic bursting of the financial bubble. Themes include the volatility of fortune, the interplay of personal ambition and public consequence, and the human costs of speculation, while episodes of adventure, romance, and moral reckoning give the historical spectacle a novelistic immediacy.