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Ingenious Pain

On sale

11th July 2019

Price: £19.99

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Selected: Audiobook Downloadable / ISBN-13: 9781529361131

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The extraordinary prize-winning debut from Andrew Miller. Winner of the IMPAC Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

At the dawn of the Enlightenment, James Dyer is born unable to feel pain. A source of wonder and scientific curiosity as a child, he rises through the ranks of Georgian society to become a brilliant surgeon. Yet as a human being he fails, for he can no more feel love and compassion than pain. Until, en route to St Petersburg to inoculate the Empress Catherine against smallpox, he meets his nemesis and saviour.

(P)2019 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Reviews

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