Ingenious Pain

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.

Winner of International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 1999

“'Strange, unsettling, sad, beautiful, and profound' Literary Review”

Set in the mid-18th century, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, and roving through England, Europe and Russia, it presents James Dyer, a man whose absence of compassion is physical: he can't feel pain . . . gripping throughout . . . a book that gives visceral pleasure - Independent on Sunday

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

Miller's juxtaposition of the weirdly wonderful with the harsh reality and brutality of eighteenth-century life is a powerful vehicle for the themes he has chosen to explore . . . A dazzling debut - Observer

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

Astoundingly good . . . it shines like a beacon among the grey dross of much contemporary fiction - The Times

Strange, unsettling, sad, beautiful, and profound - Literary Review

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

Skilfully constructed, reaching imaginative heights and emotional depths, this fine first novel explores the question of what it means to be human - The Times Literary Supplement

Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and greeted as the debut of an outstanding new writer. 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 was followed by Casanova, then Oxygen, which was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, and One Morning Like A Bird. In 2011, his sixth novel, Pure, was published to great acclaim and went on to win the Costa Book of the Year Award.

Andrew Miller's novels have been translated into thirty languages. Born in Bristol in 1960, he has lived in Spain, Japan, France and Ireland, and currently lives in Somerset.

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.

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