The newly built Glasgow Royal Infirmary is the centre of a storyline for pioneering treatment of glaucoma. The minor characters are drawn well enough in vignettes, and Emily (the romantic connection) is plausible in that women of that era were severely constrained by propriety and a lack of opportunity.

I won’t give more specifics about the plot; I’ll just note that it sets up a structure that is at once simple and increasingly suspenseful. What makes other times and places recognisable and relevant is the similarity to us of the people who inhabit them. Ultimately, this is a book about the horrors of war, and what it does to the humans who are involved in it. Meanwhile in Spain the English army is pressured to investigate war crimes English soldiers committed in Spanish village, the English and Spanish soldiers are sent to hunt the officer responsible. 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 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. The trackers’ pursuit wreaks havoc and pain on numerous willing and unwilling folks who enabled the fleer in his flight.

From its first sentence it grabs the reader's attention, and it never lets go - the narrative is a gripping, propulsive, thrilling ride. A thoroughly intriguing read and well placed in the historical setting, with enough references to critique modern society. 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. At least historical fiction doesn’t have the haircut problem that historical television invariably suffers from.A brilliantly told historical fiction novel, with rich characters and a wonderful plot - such tensely dramatic moments! Just as the hero of his first novel is mostly incapable of feeling pain, and the heroine of 2015’s The Crossing is inscrutable in the aftermath of tragedy, so his current protagonist, John Lacroix, is closed off from those around him.

Perhaps his excellent eighth book, a cat-and-mouse thriller set at the height of the Napoleonic wars, will change that, though the fact it’s not made this year’s Man Booker longlist is already something of a travesty. Familiar to the flight-pursuit trope, love redeems the fleeing good guy and we’re left with an hopeful but unresolved ending. Only towards the end of the book will he reveal the nature of those memories to a confidante to whom he has become close. Having finished Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, I am further impressed and really need to seek out the ones I haven’t read.Exactly what, and how bad, we are left to imagine, while a fellow officer arrives to remind him that he is still a soldier and should report for duty when recovered. He fills his novel with vividly etched characters and has a way with words that delights, surprises and enthrals. a novel of delicately shifting moods, a pastoral comedy and passionate romance story alternating with a blackly menacing thriller. Proof if any were needed that truly literary fiction can make for compulsive, suspenseful and joyous reading.

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 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. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain.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. With writing that's elegiac and enthralling, this is a chase story with a wry edge and a romantic heart. It says something , not quite sure what though, when the charachter chasing the hero is more fascinating than the actual hero.