Ingenious Pain

Critics Review

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

  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 Süskind’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