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

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Simultaneously nervous, choppy and unengaging, and at the same time we were suffering scenes after scenes that gave me nothing. Andrew Miller's talent for immersive world-building, fully-rounded characterizations, profound emotional and philisophical meditations, combined with exciting plotting are all on display in this novel. Indeed, surely one of the most pressing ethical obligations of our own time and place is to recognise ourselves in the other. 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. I have never studied the Napoleonic wars, and especially the Spanish campaign and the peninsular wars.

While fighting in Spain, it eventually becomes apparent, he was witness to a My Lai-like massacre carried out by frightened, starving British troops against the small Spanish village of Morales. Can I tell you again (and possibly again) about the beauty of Miller’s writing or how entertaining this was to read? Meanwhile in Spain a military court has found him guilty, and a violent and unscrupulous corporal is sent to pursue him with a Spanish soldier for company. And I kept liking this book less with every chapter until I was pushing myself towards the finish line, hoping I can still enjoy something in the book.There are some fanciful touches–I liked the description of the two pursuing soldiers walking in the woods with “the war spooling from their backs like silk,” for example. What makes other times and places recognisable and relevant is the similarity to us of the people who inhabit them.

It was odd to take in the world through his feet, the soles as sensitive, as inquisitive as a tongue.For all the world like a profoundly more complex The Thirty-Nine Steps, the novel reconstructs what happens when someone who has always seen themselves as good and law-abiding – in this case John Lacroix, a young commissioned officer and would-be musician from Somerset – is suddenly cast into the role of fugitive. As in other compelling flight-pursuit thrillers—Thomas Perry’s Jane Whitefield as a wonderful example— Now We Shall Be Entirely Free centers on the flight of a good guy who’s done something bad. From its first sentence it grabs the reader's attention, and it never lets go - the narrative is a gripping, propulsive, thrilling ride. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Hopefully when he promotes the latest novel, the chance will arise to ask Andrew Miller about the Frend love triangle, and my suspicions about Thorpe’s death.

The dramatic quality could have been retained (or even enhanced) by a bit of variety: the novel might have gone somewhere else, either back to the war or to some other plotline, to give a more organic feel to something that begins to seem prescriptively tailored. Little does he know that he is being pursued by two men that have much more sinister plans than forcing him back into service. This was a huge disappointment of something I was really looking forward to read, but right now, I'm relieved that I'm finished, and I can add another book to my charity bag. This was the tall one, this the sleek, this the bare, this like something made more entirely from light and water.

It is a four-square adventure story, with an intrepid male hero, a supporting cast of women who are either meekly servile or scrabbling rather prettily at the bars of convention, landscapes that are rugged but essentially benevolent, and a villain who – although allowed some reason for being so – is a real bastard.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a historical novel, but it is also many other things - a war novel, a romance, an adventure story, a cat and mouse chase, a story of friendship. All wankers,” he says, “every one of them,” employing a word that surely won’t be used this way for another hundred years.

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. Por primera vez en años, una recomendación hecha por el personal de Waterstones no me terminó de convencer. I don’t feel the need to fact-check novels, whether set contemporaneously or in the early nineteenth century.