The Slowworm’s Song
ANDREW MILLER
(SCEPTRE, 288 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

Few novelists are as virtuosic and as varied as Andrew Miller. In nine books published over the last 25 years, he’s ranged from 1940s Japan (One Morning Like a Bird) to pre-­revolutionary Paris (Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year); from a troubled physician in the age of Enlightenment (his multiple-­prizewinning debut, Ingenious Pain) to an episode in the life of Casanova. Other novels have been set closer to the present, though always with a haunting sense of the past. His latest takes another unexpected turn, as an alcoholic ex-soldier comes to terms with his actions decades earlier in Northern Ireland.