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

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Recommended to fans of historical fiction and even to sceptics like myself - I think anyone who enjoys a story well-told will find something to love here.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free , a high grade cat-and-mouse manhunt that covers the length of Britain during the Napoleonic Wars - a sort of The 39 Steps with added malice - is pitch-perfect. As mentioned above, I enjoyed Now We Shall Be Entirely Free immensely and it afforded me a welcome opportunity to completely lose myself in a good story. With lyrical writing and a perfectly paced plot, the tension of the impending confrontation mounts whilst allowing the reader to become attached to the main characters. Writing this review, I looked back over my previous reviews of Miller’s novels, and I was interested to see how ambivalent I had been right down the path.There is war, terrible acts of violence, a despicable character but you will find some peace and love which can change everything .

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.The linear design of the novel gives it a lot of forward momentum, but not so much that you want to rush through Miller’s wonderful prose, which is resonant without ever being florid or overly ornamental. Sightseers would fly to the islands from London, drop anchor in a spot like this, swarm around with their sketch books, then up a ladder again and off to … Iceland. When John finds himself eating in the same hotel bedroom as Emily, Miller describes how: “Hehe could not get the word fucking out of his head. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is full of the kind of historical detail that gives its world solidity, but it is not burdened by it; Miller uses his very specific and deftly dramatized story about a particular time and place to explore the kinds of choices we all have to make in our lives about where to go and why, and to ask what we hope to find if we ever get there. Miller also intentionally or unintentionally repurposes the My Lai massacre as part of his historical fantasy, even incorporating the names of three court martialed US Army officers.

I'd have awarded five stars, but the big moments - ones the reader knows will come long before they arrive - failed completely, on arrival, to pack the anticipated punch. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free opens in 1809, shortly after the Spanish campaign of the Peninsular war.

War, it’s brutality, it’s deprivations and challenges could certainly bring out the best in some men, but inevitably, horrifyingly, it could also bring out the very worst in others. 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. A curious and compelling story, that questions how people are to navigate through turbulent emotions following a traumatic experiences, grief and self reproach - to then find a sense of direction in their lives. a novel of delicately shifting moods, a pastoral comedy and passionate romance story alternating with a blackly menacing thriller.

They were beautiful–more so than he had prepared himself for, and it comforted him a little that he had had the sense to find them, the world’s scattered edge, that there was in him, perhaps, some trace of a wisdom that could guide his actions. More than anything it focuses on the tentative, partial ways in which people come to know themselves and to know others.John has been brought home from Spain and the Peninsular War in a bad way, and is left with his housekeeper in rural Somerset. The beautiful cover is the only redeemable aspect of this sorry tale and even then, I can't bring myself to mark it up a star solely because of that. 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. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (a title more reminiscent of a Dave Eggers novel than one by the author of Oxygen and Pure) has many of the qualities of a thriller.