Ingenious Pain

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

By: Andrew Miller

Narrated by: John Sackville

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©1997 Andrew Miller

Critic reviews

A wild adventure through 18th-century England and Russia, medicine, madness, landscape and weather, rendered in prose of consummate beauty

A really remarkable first novel, original, powerfully written . . . Miller's narrative is gripping and his imagination extraordinary

Astoundingly good . . . it shines like a beacon

Timeless and thought-provoking . . . it is something very rare in modern fiction, a true work of art

Gripping . . . a dazzling debut

Dazzling . . . Miller tackles notions of mortality and humanity to brilliant effect . . . truly wonderful

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

Exceptionally intelligent and elegant . . . remarkable for its feeling and its humane sensibility

A true rarity: a debut novel which is original, memorable, engrossing and subtle

Strange, unsettling, sad, beautiful and profound . . . the sense of period is brilliantly handled

More than merits comparison with the likes of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Patrick Süskind's Perfume . . . a blistering debut

The novel's evocation of the period, down to the finest detail, is thoroughly confident . . . a startling novel

A finely wrought and provocative novel

Impressive