Now We Shall Be Entirely Free: The Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2019

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His deafness also sets him apart making him feel unreachable and vague at times, like grasping at water. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. From its first sentence it grabs the reader's attention, and it never lets go - the narrative is a gripping, propulsive, thrilling ride.

The result, for each, is heightened vulnerability and a slight withdrawal from a world that can no longer be fully perceived. At the same time a pyschopathic English corporal and a refined Spanish cavalry officer are sent from Lisbon to wreak justice on Lacroix in penance for a British Army atrocity. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free opens in 1809, shortly after the Spanish campaign of the Peninsular war. As characters traverse the length and breadth of the country, a Britain is evoked that seems entirely plausible and yet frighteningly strange.These are disturbing questions, yet the novel is no worthy, schematic churn through a series of ethical options, but a pacy thriller. By the Costa Award-winning author of PURE, a stunning historical novel with the grip of a thriller, written in richly evocative, luminous prose.

I’m not a reader who insists on internal consistency or historical accuracy within a novel: I prefer both as evidence of authorial and editorial care, but I can enjoy a novel even without them. It is about a young Englishman who comes back wounded from fighting in the Peninsular War/Napoleonic Wars over in Spain in 1809. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?The island on which Lacroix settles for a while is initially reported as having no trees, then it has a few trees, then it is treeless. But there’s an intimacy to the way he inhabits his characters that makes them feel modern and natural. It struck me reading this that one of the pleasures of historical fiction is that it can’t take the world for granted, as a modern book can – everything that is different from our world has to be described or implied with language, has to be created afresh. Now We Shall be Entirely Free is the first of Andrew Millar's novels that I have read but it certainly won't be the last. He was afraid he would say it – that Emily would ask some perfectly innocent question and he would say it.

According to this article at the Guardian, when asked what it meant to be a novelist Andrew Miller replied:“Eyes open, heart open, feet on the ground. There is a lot of suffering in the novel: that harsh experience, grief, and failure should make us welcome, not turn away from, joy is one of the lessons Lacroix struggles to learn and that Miller, indirectly, offers us in our turn. a novel of delicately shifting moods, a pastoral comedy and passionate romance story alternating with a blackly menacing thriller. In the end, the reader is left unchanged but with a sense of having enjoyed a brief and worthwhile exposure to a handful of obscure, troubled lives.Like most of his books, it’s set in the past — in the early 19th century, in this case, when John Lacroix, a British Army officer and veteran of the Peninsular War between England and France, is deposited, half-dead, at his estate in Somerset. I still eye the Booker list, of course, but I am increasingly interested in the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, for one, which plays more predictably to my own preference for both good scene setting (yay, exposition! Peace and quiet are conveyed by Nell's calm , sure ministering of John betraying however John's inner turmoil over guilt and post trauma of war. Simultaneously nervous, choppy and unengaging, and at the same time we were suffering scenes after scenes that gave me nothing. He has I think succeeded in that but failed in drawing in this reader – as perhaps my choice of opening quote indicates.

The sun was rising swiftly and he saw that he was standing at the edge of a meadow, the grasses growing from sand, and in the grass myriad small flowers he had not been aware of when he came the first time, that must have been closed against the weather, the chill of evening. Miller has much to say and I hope he finds readers that will come, not just for the great story telling, but to discover those themes that run deeper throughout the book. All the book’s perceptions are deftly given to his characters, with the double result that the observations feel peculiarly intimate, and the characters themselves come vividly to life.The Optimists (2005) is another novel about atrocity and responsibility, but set in an unspecified African country with similarities to Rwanda during the genocide, while The Crossing (2015) takes place partly offshore, in a boat.