Andrew Miller is probably best known as a practitioner of the historical novel. Over the course of his career he has offered imaginative reconstructions of the worlds of 18th-century England, Russia and Germany (Ingenious Pain; Casanova); of 1940s Japan and the country’s war with China (One Morning Like a Bird); and of the thanatological terrain of pre-revolutionary France (Pure). Yet alongside these exuberant excursions into history, Miller has maintained an interest in visiting the less obviously dramatic landscapes of our interior lives – an interest that is perhaps at its most concentrated in his third novel, Oxygen (2001), which tells the story of an exiled Hungarian playwright in search of redemption (Miller can’t keep politics out of things altogether) and a terminally ill woman and her relationship with her sons.

It is with Oxygen that The Crossing is