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

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He will not - cannot - talk about the war or face the memory of what took place on the retreat to Corunna. And when you think it's all done and dusted - the writing by numbers reaching its natural conclusion - the denouement strangely tips all that aside and leaves the reader asking 'what?

the ordinary men who took up arms and went off to fight for causes that they possibly didn’t really understand. I’m not going to give away too much of the plot (no more than if you were to read the jacket flap) as I believe the reader will find pleasure in experiencing Miller’s story on their own.I cared so little that I wasn’t even curious about revelations about the mystery that drove the whole chase (and it was obvious in the middle of the book, I waited for a twist that never came). Through his hyper-real evocation of the times and places he chooses, he invites us in to join these experiments. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Eyes open, heart open, feet on the ground’: Andrew Miller. But overall I found this an uninteresting book – far too masculine: the author has stated he was looking to reproduce “the kind of energetic adventure stories” he read and loved as a boy.

Miller hat einen ganz wunderbaren Historischen Roman geschrieben, der vor allem durch seine kunstvoll gesetzten Auslassungen, Leerstellen, Perspektiv-, Orts- und Zeitwechsel besticht und den Leser in eine nicht nachlassende Grundspannung versetzt. No ancient and honourable institution is without its ancient and honourable crimes,” observes a shadowy superior. With his lovely prose, Miller has refashioned a flight-pursuit trope into an historical novel or, perhaps more accurately, an historical fantasy set loosely in the the Napoleonic Wars. Foremost, and this underpins Miller’s story, is the abandonment of concepts of fairness or of any noble intent in war.A sense of menace permeates the novel and there is a perfectly odious villain, but Miller does offset this with some lightness and humor mixed into his tale. I have holidayed in the Hebrides for several years and the writing set there is generic and characterless: it is hard to believe Miller has been there and it feels like “The Hebrides” is a convenient way of saying “somewhere a long way away”. La storia è semplice e parla di un'esperienza, quella dell'inumanità e dello straniamento causato dalla guerra che solo l'amore può forse sanare, che è stata trattata in tanti altri libri. 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. It throws out its big ideas with such lightness of touch that it’s only afterwards that the reader feels their sting.