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. Familiar to the flight-pursuit trope, love redeems the fleeing good guy and we’re left with an hopeful but unresolved ending. During The Napoleonic wars, the Englishman suddenly comes back home in a half-dead state and then he goes on the run from some secret he left behind in Spain. I bought this new from Waterstones, and if my memory serves me well, the man that served me even recommended it as a 'Must read'. A British army ‘incident’ is investigated, and the reader is a party to a slick chase (the pursuit of Lacroix) throughout the British isles and the perpetrators of brutality against prisoners, and women, and the civilian community are to be brought to summary justice.

Then she stood a while in the odd grey light of the snow, looking at the soft confusion of footprints by the door of the house. It was odd to take in the world through his feet, the soles as sensitive, as inquisitive as a tongue. The newly built Glasgow Royal Infirmary is the centre of a storyline for pioneering treatment of glaucoma. Like several of his previous books – including his multi-awardwinning first novel Ingenious Pain (1997) and the Costa prize-winning Pure (2011) – Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is set in the early Romantic period, and like those precursors it plays no formal tricks and has no obvious ludic or cultural self-consciousness. ben scritto, almeno da quello che posso giudicare visto che io sono italiana e il libro è in inglese.

There is a villain but one gets acquainted with this villain’s childhood, and…well I won’t say anything more because I don’t want to include any spoilers about this book.

As a massive fan of Haruki Murakami, the intricate descriptions are very much something I enjoy, so, naturally, I absolutely fell in love with this book. 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. The main protagonist John Lacroix is possibly the most bland literary character I’ve ever encountered. He will not - cannot - talk about the war or face the memory of what took place on the retreat to Corunna. So far so thriller but in the hands of Andrew Miller the story becomes so much more, historical fiction, travelogue, zen like mediation, psychological exposition and romance are all skilfully meshed together for a beautifully written compelling story.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 have been lucky to have read several brilliant novels recently, and this one will stay with me for a long time.