Doctors don’t treat their own families. Teachers don’t mark their own children’s work. Both rules exist because judgement goes soft exactly where it matters most. Inter Alia’s protagonist, Jessica Parks – a Crown Court judge played by Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike onstage since 2025 – lives a double life: stopping defence lawyers from asking in court what a complainant was wearing, then going home to iron a Hawaiian shirt for her son. Living life while “juggling everything in the cracks of everyone else’s needs”.
Suzie Miller’s second novel, an adaptation of her critically acclaimed play by the same name, has a familiar dilemma at its centre – what does a parent owe a child who’s done something unforgivable? – with a case built from digital debris: group chats, videos, a phone the police have emptied.
When Jessica’s 18-year-old son, Harry – the child of a judge and a King’s Counsel – is accused of rape by Amy, a girl he’s known since primary school, the novel turns into a study in complicity. Jessica reaches almost instinctively for arguments she’s spent her career refusing to permit in her own courtroom – the girl was drunk, she’s mistaken him for someone else. Amy does everything a survivor is told to do – she tells her mother and the police – and her account is still treated as something to be managed. It’s the same argument Australian filmmaker Selina Miles makes in the documentary Silenced, which looks at the weaponisation of defamation laws: how having a voice and being free to use it aren’t the same.
Miller juggled playwriting and community legal work for years until the offer of a magistracy and a residency at the National Theatre in London arrived together. She chose theatre. The novel shows the precision of someone who’s professionally navigated courtrooms – charges are named by statute, cross-examinations follow real tactics, and legally correct advice is dropped into conversations.
Inter Alia never quite sheds its stage origins. Jessica explains her job to the reader in soliloquy, half confession, the way a character might turn to the audience: “As a judge, there are no fun and games, no laughing after court…” When Jessica turns on her husband – “I tried to raise a feminist son” – it’s dialogue that might jolt an audience but reads cold on the page.
By the last pages, the legal strategy Jessica has built for her son – “go to court and say nothing” – still holds up: silence isn’t the same as an outright lie. Her son refuses it anyway. Inter Alia doesn’t end with Jessica doing the right thing. It settles instead on the gap between professional duty and personal imperatives.
Picador, 304pp, $34.99