Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him.

In his father’s footsteps, Roger Milliss takes up the challenge of communism not only as an alternative to capitalism, ‘a rival system of ideas, a strategy and set of tactics that would challenge the hegemony’, but also as a personal vocation.