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. 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. 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. This article was amended on 30 August 2022. The Act of Oblivion was passed in 1660, not 1652 as an earlier version said. 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.

He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.'Do remember, though, that this is fiction, told from Cicero’s point of view, and (for example) Julius Caesar may not have been quite as bad as he is portrayed by Robert Harris. According to Classics teacher Olly Murphy, in his interview on the best Classics books for teenagers, Harris “does put in things which now we might say are controversial or we’re not sure about but, for the most part, his portrayal of what it would have been like for a senator going about his daily business is absolutely spot on.” A successful journalist, his best-selling debut novel, Fatherland imagined a counter-factual world where the Nazis won the Second World War. More recently, The Ghost was a thinly-veiled take-down of Tony Blair, through the eyes of a ghost-writer. Harris and Blair were friends until the Iraq War. 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.” 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.

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. 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.

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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.

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. 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. 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 But these are small cavils in a chase story that generally grips from start to finish. And yes, I did care. Read more Would you want to be a political editor now? What in the political landscape has changed most since you were?

Act of Oblivion – Robert Harris

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.

His journal allows us to see into his uncertainties and vulnerabilities, sides of his character which are crucial to ensuring that we stay engaged. 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. Robert Harris (no relation) has an impressive CV. His historical thrillers stretch from Imperial Rome ( Pompeii and Imperium) to 800 years in the future ( Second Sleep). 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. 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.Act of Oblivion is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other. It is the thrilling new novel by Robert Harris. I’m sitting here with biography. Literary biography and history are in the hall. Military history and Nazis are on the landing outside the bedroom – a rather sinister wall, it has to be said, but they paid for the house. Fiction in the drawing room and in our bedroom. There’s no point in having an awful lot of books if you can’t more or less find something when you want to read it, so they’re reasonably alphabetic in those sections. However, true stories rarely provide the writer with a neat structure, and here I feel the middle sags a bit.