Ingenious Pain

Ingenious Pain: the extraordinary prize-winning debut from the author of The Land in Winter 'Astoundingly good' The Times 'Dazzling' Observer 'Timeless' Spectator At the dawn of the Enlightenment, a man 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, he meets his nemesis and saviour. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award Praise for Andrew Miller
'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight' Hilary Mantel 'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind' Sunday Times
'One of the best writers at work today' Telegraph 'A wonderful storyteller' Spectator
'One of those rare novelists who can rock up in any time and place and convincingly inhabit that particular historical moment' The Times

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 in 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, The Slowworm's Song and The Land in Winter, which won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. Andrew Miller's novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.