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The acclaimed author of Pure delivers a thoughtful and perceptive meditation on guilt and the impossibility of outrunning your past, as a summons to an inquiry reawakens dreadful memories of the Northern Irish Troubles.

Venue: Colchester Library, Trinity Square, Colchester, CO1 1JB

Tickets: £8 / £7

Date and time: Wednesday 29th June, 7.30pm

Box Office: Book online or via Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller

By the Costa Award-winning author of Pure, a profound and tender tale of guilt, a search for atonement and the hard, uncertain work of loving.

An ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic living quietly in Somerset, Stephen Rose has just begun to form a bond with the daughter he barely knows when he receives a summons – to an inquiry into an incident during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

It is the return of what Stephen hoped he had outdistanced. Above all, to testify would jeopardise the fragile relationship with his daughter. And if he loses her, he loses everything.

Instead, he decides to write her an account of his life; a confession, a defence, a love letter. Also a means of buying time. But time is running out, and the day comes when he must face again what happened in that faraway summer of 1982.

‘The writing is near perfect. But the novel’s excellence goes far beyond this . . . You read [it] . . . with your pulse racing, all your senses awake’ Guardian

‘A beautiful, lambent, timely novel’ – Sarah Hall

About the Author

A British novelist best known for his richly immersive historical fiction, Andrew Miller’s first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His other works are: Casanova, Oxygen (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award), The Optimists, One Morning Like A Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2011, The Crossing and 2018’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free.

Andrew Miller’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

Photo of Andrew Miller © Abbie Trayler-Smith