Optimists
Regular price
€17.50
⭐ Out now: The Land in Winter, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 ⭐
The Optimists: in a world full of suffering, how can we have faith in humanity, or the future?
'Exceptional'
Sunday Times
'Powerful and lively'
Financial Times
'A delight'
Time Out
Clem Glass, a photojournalist, returns from Africa to London convinced there is no hope for mankind.
Yet after his sister falls ill and he takes her back to the West Country of their childhood, he cannot ignore the decency and kindness he encounters, or the pulse of goodness in his own heart.
When news comes offering Clem the chance to confront the author of his nightmares, he must choose what sort of man to be.
Praise for Andrew Miller
'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight' Hilary Mantel
'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind' Sunday Times
'One of the best writers at work today' Telegraph
'A wonderful storyteller' Spectator
'One of those rare novelists who can rock up in any time and place and convincingly inhabit that particular historical moment' The Times
The Optimists: in a world full of suffering, how can we have faith in humanity, or the future?
'Exceptional'
Sunday Times
'Powerful and lively'
Financial Times
'A delight'
Time Out
Clem Glass, a photojournalist, returns from Africa to London convinced there is no hope for mankind.
Yet after his sister falls ill and he takes her back to the West Country of their childhood, he cannot ignore the decency and kindness he encounters, or the pulse of goodness in his own heart.
When news comes offering Clem the chance to confront the author of his nightmares, he must choose what sort of man to be.
Praise for Andrew Miller
'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight' Hilary Mantel
'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind' Sunday Times
'One of the best writers at work today' Telegraph
'A wonderful storyteller' Spectator
'One of those rare novelists who can rock up in any time and place and convincingly inhabit that particular historical moment' The Times
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, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. Andrew Miller's novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.