Stephen Rose is a former soldier. Serving in the British Army during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he shot and killed an innocent teenager. Many years later, now a recovering alcoholic, divorced, and trying to build a relationship with the daughter he barely knows, Stephen receives an invitation to testify before a commission investigating the conflict. The invitation provokes him to write a letter to his daughter setting out the steps that led to that fateful day in 1982 and all the consequences that flowed from it.

The experience of reading a novel as good as The Slowworm’s Song is in part an appreciation of the particular genius required to convey an authentic human life in a work of fiction. Stephen Rose is an unforgettable creation – wholly believable in all his complexity, his longing for love and acceptance, his evasions, and his honesty. This is a human life rendered in words of fiction, yet entirely convincing and real. It is more than four years since I first discovered Andrew Miller’s 2018 novel Now We Shall Be Entirely Free and, on the evidence of the two novels by him I have read, I think he is one of the most talented and creative novelists working in English today.