Ingenious Pain

A wild adventure through 18th-century England and Russia, medicine, madness, landscape and weather, rendered in prose of consummate beauty -- Books of the Year * Independent * A really remarkable first novel, original, powerfully written . . . Miller's narrative is gripping and his imagination extraordinary * Sunday Telegraph * Astoundingly good . . . it shines like a beacon * The Times * Timeless and thought-provoking . . . it is something very rare in modern fiction, a true work of art * Spectator * Gripping . . . a dazzling debut * Observer * Dazzling . . . Miller tackles notions of mortality and humanity to brilliant effect . . . truly wonderful * Evening Standard * An extraordinary first novel . . . one is constantly delighted with strange and vivid imagery, fresh and startling metaphors, flashes of insight, deft twists of plot and resonant variations on dominant themes . . . a mature novel of ideas soaked in the sensory detail of its turbulent times * New York Times Book Review * Exceptionally intelligent and elegant . . . remarkable for its feeling and its humane sensibility * Sunday Times * A true rarity: a debut novel which is original, memorable, engrossing and subtle * Guardian * Strange, unsettling, sad, beautiful and profound . . . the sense of period is brilliantly handled * Literary Review * More than merits comparison with the likes of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Patrick Sskind's Perfume . . . a blistering debut * Time Out * The novel's evocation of the period, down to the finest detail, is thoroughly confident . . . a startling novel * Independent on Sunday * A finely wrought and provocative novel * Daily Telegraph * Impressive * Mail on Sunday *

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 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free and The Slowworm's Song. Andrew Miller's novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.