Britain

Andrew Miller

Photo © Linda Nylind

Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller’s first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997; 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. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award in 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, The Slowworm’s Song and The Land in Winter, which won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2025. Andrew Miller’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

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Latest reviews

★ “Masterful, acute... Miller is an expert juggler of dark and light, of big and small, of seen and unseen.”

— Kirkus Reviews, Sep 8 2025

★ “A stunning portrait of domestic turmoil and post-WWII unease... A spectacularly vivid sense of gloom pervades the narrative... Even keener are the author’s crystalline depictions of his characters’ interior lives. This has the feel of an instant classic.”

— Publishers Weekly, Sep 8 2025

“After an incredibly powerful opening scene, nothing much happens – yet the whole of life is at stake... The writing is masterful, and the prose has all the richness and evocativeness of poetry. Like all great novels, it stays with you long after the final page has turned.”

— Historical Novels Review, Sep 3 2025

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this beautifully layered novel transports us back to the frigid winter of 1962-63, as two pregnant neighbors in England's West Country grapple with attraction and ambivalence.

— Boston Globe, Aug 21 2025

“Miller’s novel subtly and morosely explores the crisis of Englishness that ties together events of the 20th century with those of the 21st...not only nuanced and affecting but historiographical. It reads truer than memoir.”

— The New York Times Book Review, Oct 11 2022

The narrator of this novel is a British former soldier and recovering alcoholic, who becomes unhinged after a letter summons him to Belfast to give evidence to a commission investigating a tragic incident that occurred in 1982, during the Troubles.”

— The New Yorker, Oct 10 2022

“Expertly paced...as taut as a thriller...Mr. Miller, with his acute eye for detail and his practiced sense of timing, describes these Belfast streets and this soldier’s experience so plainly and yet so evocatively that both become new again.”

— Wall Street Journal, Oct 7 2022

“This is a moving, beautifully written portrait of a legacy of shame, loss, and regret.”

— Booklist (Starred Review), Sep 12 2022

“The Slowworm’s Song follows a father’s attempts to reconcile with his daughter—and his attempts to understand his own past.”

— Foreword Reviews (Starred Review), Sep 1 2022

“An intelligent approach to human frailty and redemption.”

— Reading the West, Aug 24 2022

★ “The novel’s evocation of that time and place is cinematically clear, and the narrative revolves around that single dread-filled moment.”

— Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review), Jul 8 2022

“The writing is near perfect. But the novel’s excellence goes far beyond this. There’s a depth and a sweetness, a gravity... A restrained, beautifully written apologia for our common frailty.”

— The Guardian, Feb 12 2022

“Miller keeps readers engaged...This is escapism at a compelling level.”

— The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jul 13 2020

“Miller acutely imagines the war-scarred psychology of his characters...and uses the historical setting to great advantage.” Read the full article in the New Yorker

— The New Yorker, Nov 11 2019

“This book is expertly researched and captures the venues and feelings of the period exceptionally well.” Read the full review in the Historical Novel Society

— Historical Novel Society, Nov 4 2019

“Mr. Miller strikes an impressive balance between adventure and atmosphere. As in a good thriller, madness bubbles beneath the surface of the scenes...But while the threat of violence keeps the story’s wheels in motion, its greatest pleasures owe to its unhurried, ambulatory...

— The Wall Street Journal, Oct 18 2019

“[Andrew Miller] is a very stylish, almost painterly writer, and he has her gift for historical reconstruction, for describing the past without making it seem like a wax museum.”

— New York Times Book Review, Sep 10 2019

“Miller is in fine form here, mixing an unforgettable cat-and-mouse chase with a moving love story.”

— Kirkus Reviews, Jun 17 2019