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By the Costa Award-winning author of PURE, a stunning historical novel - the tale of a traumatised soldier on a journey in search of peace, which turns into a nail-biting hunt to the death.

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´His writing is vivid, precise and constantly surprising. It reads easily, suspends life until it is read and is a source of wonder and delight´
Hilary Mantel in the Sunday Times

One rainswept winter´s night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain´s disastrous campaign against Napoleon´s forces in Spain.
Gradually Lacroix recovers his health, but not his peace of mind, so when the command comes to return to his regiment, he lights out instead for the Hebrides ? unaware that a vicious English corporal and a Spanish officer are secretly on his trail.

In luminous prose, Miller portrays a man shattered by what he has witnessed, on a journey that leads to unexpected friendships, even to love. But as the short northern summer reaches its zenith, the shadow of the enemy creeps ever closer. Freedom, for John Lacroix, will come at a high price.

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Andrew Miller´s first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His subsequent novels include Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Pure, which won the 2011 Costa Book of the Year Award.

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Scary, mysterious and thoughtful - the world of Jane Austen bespattered by mud, atrocity and driving rain. Andrew Marr, Books of the Year New Statesman

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Miller, Andrew

Andrew Miller´s first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and greeted as the debut of an outstanding new writer. 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 2011, and The Crossing.

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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