The book
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of Fall 2022
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.
The author
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.
Press
- Oct 11 2022
“A state-of-the-nation novel, in elegiac prose.”
— The New York Times Book Review - Oct 10 2022
“A sincere redemptive attempt.”
— The New Yorker - Oct 7 2022
“Expertly paced...as taut as a thriller.”
— Wall Street Journal - Sep 12 2022
★ “Moving, beautifully written.”
— Booklist (Starred Review) - Sep 1 2022
★ “An exquisite, tender novel.”
— Foreword Reviews (Starred Review) - Aug 24 2022
“Poignant and moving.”
— Reading the West