By the Costa Award-winning author of PURE, a stunning historical novel - the tale of a traumatised soldier on a journey in search of peace, which turns into a nail-biting hunt to the death.

⭐ Out now: The Land in Winter, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 ⭐

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free: a stunning historical novel with the grip of a thriller

One of The Times' Best Novels of the 21st Century

A book of the year: Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator, BBC History Magazine
'Excellent' Observer

'This is fiction - storytelling - at its best' Spectator

'That rarest of treats - propulsive storytelling in sensuous prose' Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures and Shy Creatures

When Captain John Lacroix returns to England after fighting Napoleon's forces in Spain, he is not the man he was. A survivor of the British arm's infamous retreat to Corunna, he carries with him a shameful secret, one he will travel to the outer reaches of Scotland to forget.

Lacroix's journey to the Hebrides leads to encounters with thieves and free thinkers, to unexpected friendships, even love. But as the short northern summer reaches its zenith, the shadow of the enemy is creeping closer - unbeknownst to Lacroix, a vicious English corporal and a Spanish officer are on his trail. Freedom, for John Lacroix, will come at a high price.

Winner of the Highland Book Prize | Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize

Praise for Andrew Miller
'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight' Hilary Mantel

'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind' Sunday Times

'Unique, visionary, a master at unmasking humanity' Sarah Hall

'A wonderful storyteller' Spectator

'One of those rare novelists who can rock up in any time and place and convincingly inhabit that particular historical moment' The Times

He is a very stylish, almost painterly writer, and he has Hilary Mantel's gift for historical reconstruction, for describing the past without making it seem like a wax museum. In some of his best books - like Ingenious Pain, his first, about an 18th-century doctor, and the more recent Pure, about an engineer in pre-revolutionary France trying to clean up an ancient cemetery - he brings off the Mantel trick of plunging you so deeply into the past that before long you take it completely for granted . . . A subtheme of this novel, where one of the main characters can't see and the other can't hear, is unknowability, how hard it is to make sense of the world . . . In its formal slipperiness, first one kind of book, then another, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free seems to be making the same point: that things are never quite what you expect, and history is altogether stranger than most accounts suggest. What makes Miller's own account so riveting is its alertness to wonder and unpredictability.