Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
Thursday, April 6 | 2:00pm | Woman's Club Room
by Andrew Miller
Presented by Ellie Crawford
Miller’s latest historical novel (2018) plunges readers deep into the early 19th-century England of the Peninsular Wars. Set against the backdrop of a British defeat at La Coruna, this is an exquisitely wrought story of a cavalry officer , Captain John Lacroix, involved in a massacre in a Spanish village and now returned to England, seriously wounded and partially deaf. Not knowing he is being pursued relentlessly by a man hired to ensure his silence about the massacre, he travels north to the Scottish isles with the purpose of researching Scottish airs and, through music, possibly find a way of erasing the recent vicious past. He ends up in the Hebrides in the home of a family who are members of a small sect and who, like him, are escapees from so-called civilization. By undertaking to help his host’s sister who is going blind, he finds some sort of redemption. Miller’s stunning prose masterfully creates a novel of delicately shifting moods, where pastoral comedy and passionate romance are interwoven in the highly suspenseful elements of a life-and-death pursuit by Lacroix’s nemesis.
