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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Slowworm's Song
Reader Score
81%
81% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 16 reviews on
A Best Book Of 2022 (New Yorker)
A Best Book Of Fall 2022 (Wall Street Journal)
From Costa Award-winning and Booker Prize-shortlisted author Andrew Miller comes a tender tale of guilt, trust, and a father's yearning to atone.
A harmless-looking letter drops onto the doormat in Stephen Rose's Somerset home like an unexploded bomb. It is a summons to an inquiry in Belfast, asking him to give testimony about his participation in a disastrous event during the Troubles-one he has long worked to forget.
An ailing ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic, Stephen has just begun to build a fragile bond with Maggie, the adult daughter he barely knows. For two years, he has worked hard to earn her trust, but the tragedy of what occurred back in the summer of 1982 has the power to destroy their new relationship. To buy time, he decides to write her an account of his life. Part explanation, part confession, it is also a love letter to Maggie.
When the moment comes that he must face what happened in Belfast that summer, the consequences are devastating--but ultimately liberating. Giving voice to those little heard in the literature of the Irish Troubles, The Slowworm's Song is an unforgettable story about a man who learns that the only way back from the underworld is up.
Book Details
- Publisher: Europa Editions
- Publish Date: Oct 11st, 2022
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.30in - 1.00in - 0.71lb
- EAN: 9781609458003
- Categories: • World Literature - Ireland - 20th Century• Historical - General• Literary
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About the Author
Andrew Miller is one of Britain's leading novelists. He has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. His bestselling novel Pure, a Costa Book Award winner, has received widespread acclaim and was a best-seller for Europa in 2012. The Slowworm's Song is his ninth novel.
More books by Andrew Miller
What people are saying
"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... A state-of-the-nation novel, in elegiac prose."
The New York Review of Books is a literary-intellectual magazine.
James Walton on Andrew Miller’s recent novel, The Slowworm’s Song https://t.co/ysE0vJnpDv
Film, music, books: where art and trash collide!
The Slowworm’s Song makes a fitting companion to one of 2022’s most acclaimed films, Aftersun, in that both focus on the fractured relationship between a father and a daughter, mediated by Ireland and alcohol. #AndrewMiller https://t.co/SF6fjEmwEe https://t.co/Zz0yUXuUke
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
Praise for The Slowworm's Song
★ "This is a moving, beautifully written portrait of a legacy of shame, loss, and regret from one traumatic, morally ambiguous moment."--Booklist (starred review)
★ "Immensely skillful... A moving drama of trauma and recovery."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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."--Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
"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... A state-of-the-nation novel, in elegiac prose."--Caoilinn Hughes, The New York Times Book Review
★ "An exquisite, tender novel that insists on the dignity of others, 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)
"Fine writing and an intelligent approach to human frailty and redemption make this a compelling narrative."--Reading the West
"There's a lot driving this affecting exploration of truth and reconciliation."--Publishers Weekly
"At the level of the sentence, the writing is near perfect. But the novel's excellence goes far beyond this. There's a depth and a sweetness, a gravity... You read what might have been a perfectly commonplace story of failure and redemption with your pulse racing, all your senses awake... [A] restrained, beautifully written apologia for our common frailty."--The Guardian (UK)
"I spent the first half of The Slowworm's Song in a sort of ecstasy... Stephen is an unforgettable character, and Miller has pulled off the miraculous feat of sketching a full human life in a few hundred pages."--The Sunday Times (UK)
What people are saying
"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... A state-of-the-nation novel, in elegiac prose."