As Nayler arrives in America, the pace of the novel increases, the sense of an inevitable meeting propelling the narrative forward. The chapters, paragraphs, even the sentences become shorter as the colonels seek to evade their monomaniacal pursuer. As always with Harris, there’s a delicious sense of being in the hands of a master, of watching as the pieces of the narrative puzzle fall into place. Act of Oblivion is a fine novel about a divided nation, about invisible wounds that heal slower than visible ones. Like Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant , it feels like an important book for our particular historical moment, one that shows the power of forgiveness and the intolerable burden of long-held grudges. It’s a tribute to Harris’s skill and research that Naylor is virtually the only invented character – he tells us this at the very start – and yet he rings as true as the others. I realise now that I was always a novelist earning a living as journalist, rather than a journalist who one day happened to write a novel. So I wouldn’t want to be a political editor again, although I’m grateful for the experience and I draw on it all the time, whether the novel is set in ancient Rome or 19th-century France. His new novel, Act of Oblivion represents his first foray into the politics of the seventeenth century. Which might seem surprising. Harris thrives on times of ideological conflict and moral challenge, and the English Civil War provides that in spades.

I’m writing a novel about the English civil war, so I’m reading Pepys’s diary and the speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Also Carlyle’s letters are there. The wounds of the brutal civil war are still visible on men’s bodies”: the execution of Charles I in Whitehall, London, 1649. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty Images The year is 1660. Two men flee Britain for their lives. Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe were among those who signed Charles I’s death warrant and now Charles II wants revenge. Have a character whom you’re interested in, and in whom your reader is interested, and have something interesting happen to them in this world you’ve created. That’s how you start the novel. Now, the events I’m interested in are political events and the universality of political impulses, from Cicero’s Rome to 19th-century France to Russia, Germany, wherever – the same quest for power is there. Most of my characters are peripheral – a ghost writer, a secretary – they are observers of power. It’s disgraceful, but I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume And while the author has invented him, he has done this with good reason. As Harris says, if there was a pursuit, there must have been a pursuer. It’s just that no records of who he was have survived. VulnerabilitiesBut these are small cavils in a chase story that generally grips from start to finish. And yes, I did care. Read more It’s particularly pressing when the story relates to events that took place around three hundred and fifty years ago, to people of whom we are unlikely to have heard. The novel takes its name from the The Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660, which honoured the regime’s promise not to inflict reprisals – except for those involved in the death of the king. Harris has dealt with religion and religious conflict before. Successfully in Conclave, where the election of a new pope becomes a political nailbiter. Less so in The Second Sleep, which I felt never quite worked out how to bring its ideas together in a coherent whole.

It feels churlish to say this. It’s not a big thing, but I suspect it comes from Harris’s strict adherence to the facts as we know them. He is careful not to invent anything that could not be deduced, but that leaves him with an episodic story. One of the challenges of writing about this period is that the intricacies of religious faith and faction can seem distant and abstruse to a modern audience. Goffe is a religious man – he had wanted to become a minister before the war intervened – but Harris doesn’t allow himself to become hung up on the niceties of Christian doctrine. Rather, he makes a broader point about the position of the colonels in New England: the simplicity of their faith and anti-monarchical feeling finds a natural home among the dissenters and Puritans of the New World. The impulses that would animate the revolution a hundred years hence were all there in the English civil war. This does not, alas, mean that the men have an easy time of it in Massachusetts. The publishers have provided a list of personae and a map of New England, but I rarely needed either. I found it fascinating to join a journey through famous towns and cities as they must have been in their very early years. From a nascent Boston to the future New York and many townships in between.

Hungry for more new 2022 books?

Whalley was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin and close to the heart of the Commonwealth. Goffe is if anything more fanatical and Whalley’s increased doubts in the face of his son-in-law’s entrenched beliefs form one of the many fascinating subplots. But both were Colonels in the Roundhead Army and both had blood on their hands. Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. Having been found guilty of high treason for the murder of Charles the I, they are wanted and on the run. A reward hangs over their heads - for their capture, dead or alive. Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. They are on the run and wanted for the murder of Charles I. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, they have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. If you like history, Robert Harris is one of the best historical novelists around. Pompeii (about the eruption of Vesuvius), An Officer and A Spy (about the Dreyfus Affair), even Archangel (set in Soviet Russia) are fabulous thrillers that bring the past alive. But when it came to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman, Harris really went to town and wrote an entire trilogy about him: Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator. The reason Harris was able to do this with a degree of accuracy is because Cicero wrote so much—indeed we have Cicero to thank for large chunks of our knowledge of the Latin language. The trilogy is just a wonderful evocation of what it was like to be an ambitious person in the days of the late Roman republic, as it fell apart and became an empire.

I would hardly be the first person to point out the dramatic parallels with our own age. Polarised religious sects. Fierce political debates spilling over into violence. A sense that anything was possible, for good or bad. However, true stories rarely provide the writer with a neat structure, and here I feel the middle sags a bit. In parallel strands, we follow Whalley and Goffe as they criss-cross New England, trying desperately to remain hidden, and their dedicated pursuer Richard Naylor. His journal allows us to see into his uncertainties and vulnerabilities, sides of his character which are crucial to ensuring that we stay engaged. Would you want to be a political editor now? What in the political landscape has changed most since you were?Hutchinson Heinemann said it is planning “a far-reaching and ambitious marketing and publicity campaign”. Publisher Helen Conford said: “We are very proud to be publishing a new novel from Robert Harris. Precipice is the latest thrilling masterwork from a writer at the top of his game. Writing about a world on the brink, once again Robert throws light on our present time. A gripping story and a work of huge ambition, I can’t wait for everyone to read it.” I was reminded of the TV series and film The Fugitive. Naylor is a scary and unremitting antagonist. Prepared to go to any lengths and yet always believable. And as with all good antagonists, we can see exactly why he is so driven in his turn. He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.'

That we do care is in part down to the extreme danger they face, and much due to Harris’s skill. Truth or legend?If any of this makes the book sound heavy, this is very far from the case. At no point does Harris’s research ever get in the way of the storytelling.