“Each character in this novel of cryogenic rural isolation suffers from a failure of the empathetic imagination, but fortunately, their author does not; entering Miller’s imagined world, a reader cannot help but feel compassion for them. Perhaps this prize-winning historical fiction is also a letter of sorts that Miller, who was raised in the West Country, writes to himself and his generation. By providing vivid access and forgiving tenderness to these imagined English lives in this particular time and place, the book performs an act of love.”
