Sebastian Shakespeare

Fire Dreamer

One Morning like a Bird

By

Sceptre 384pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Andrew Miller likes to shift the ground beneath his reader’s feet. His first two novels, Ingenious Pain and Casanova, were set in the eighteenth century; Oxygen alternated between Paris, Los Angeles and England; and the backdrop of The Optimists was a genocidal massacre in Africa. With his fifth novel we are once more in unfamiliar territory – Tokyo, 1940, on the eve of the war with the Allies. The sense of displacement is further exaggerated when we learn that our hero is a 25-year-old Japanese poet. Luckily for us, he has a European literary sensibility and a fascination with Rimbaud, so he is not entirely beyond our ken. In fact he fulfils the Romantic stereotype of the doomed poet afflicted by ill-health.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    Follow Us