The novel’s Peninsular Wars setting was something that attracted me to it (I enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s evocation of that period in The Trumpet Major). But I admit that Miller’s dating surgical handwashing and glaucoma surgery to the early from the mid-nineteenth century of Semmelweis and von Graefe left me slightly disgruntled. He looks at how war begets a violence in some men, how war can strip away their humanity and moral conscience. On one level it is impressive to have a book which makes no attempt at post-modernism (other than using the names of those in the My Lai massacre for some of the characters), at allegory, or at drawing parallels with modern events (any hint of Brexit in the British retreat from Europe is purely accidental) – however, in my view, this robs historical fiction of much of its interest for me. Scary, mysterious and thoughtful - the world of Jane Austen bespattered by mud, atrocity and driving rain.

His debut, Ingenious Pain (1997), and his 2015 novel, The Crossing, contain protagonists who respectively cannot feel pain and have an immensely high tolerance to it.Miller’s prose and dialogue make no obvious efforts to belong to the time in which the novel is set, and instead Miller relies on his copious and lightly displayed knowledge of period detail to give a flavour of the era. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a novel of delicately shifting moods, a pastoral comedy and passionate romance story alternating with a blackly menacing thriller. It's a twist too far, and of all the climaxes and endings available to Andrew Miller I'm perplexed as to why he chose to do that. By the Costa Award-winning author of PURE, a stunning historical novel with the grip of a thriller, written in richly evocative, luminous prose.

But there’s an intimacy to the way he inhabits his characters that makes them feel modern and natural.Well, it's almost as if Mr Miller was afeared that all these delights would not suffice, so he tacked on a thrilling if highly implausible persecution of Our Hero that made it impossible NOT to keep turning those pages until.

Why Emily was so forgiving (immediately so), when she heard John Lacroix speak of his appalling lack of leadership and inaction at Los Morales. To have done so is not a prerequisite for appreciating this historic fiction, but I was prompted to check out the conflict as a result of reading Now We Shall be Entirely Free. Already ensconced on the island is a small family of idealists, living their utopian dream in much the same way that Coleridge and others planned to do on the banks of the Susquehanna River.It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. I appreciated the inclusion of the Hebrides, but having holidayed on various of those stunning islands for many years, I couldn't understand the lack of detail and almost sparseness of the prose in those parts. Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. The chaos of war and the period detail is quite impressive, and the whole thing is a very enjoyable read, but I am deducting a star because the plotting seems a little too neat and contrived. By the end of the opening sentence of Andrew Miller's new novel, we're already knee-deep in fictional territory he has made his own.

He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain. Both the Hebridean setting and the idea of an innocent man being chased by people he doesn’t know may even remind readers of “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” John Buchan’s classic adventure novel. There might have been a couple of places that my interest was flagging but it was a page each at best–so not an issue!The antagonist, the 'baddie' however comes across purely as an ugly villain, a vicious man from the gutter with no saving graces. The central character John Lacroix is a naive young gentleman cavalry officer who has just found his way home from the retreat that ended at Corunna. Meanwhile, having made it to a remote Hebridean island on the back of a cow (one of the book’s running jokes), John encounters the Fender siblings: eccentric Cornelius, hardworking Emily, and ravishing Jane, who is five-months pregnant by Thorpe, the leader of their quasi-pagan community of free-thinkers. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free opens in 1809, shortly after the Spanish campaign of the Peninsular war. Gradually you learn that he is an ex-soldier, somehow saved from the retreat ar Corunna in the Napoleonic Wars, and now part deafened, barely alive and full of guilt for an alluded to but unravelled event, he is recovering at his family home in Somerset.