His recreation of pre-Revolutionary Paris is extraordinarily vivid and imaginative, and his story is so gripping that you’ll put your life on hold to finish it

Vivid and compelling

Enthralling . . . superbly researched, brilliantly narrated and movingly resolved

Elegant

Quietly powerful, consistently surprising, Pure is a fine addition to substantial body of work

Almost dreamlike, a realistic fantasy, a violent fairytale for adults

Every so often a historical novel comes along that is so natural, so far from pastiche, so modern, that it thrills and expands the mind. Pure is one . . . Exquisite inside and out, Pure is a near-faultless thing: detailed, symbolic and richly evocative of a time, place and man in dangerous flux. It is brilliance distilled, with very few impurities

It draws you in with hallucinatory power to seething Paris on the brink of revolution . . . images remain in your mind long after you reach the last page

Superb . . . The writing throughout is crystalline, uncontrived, striking and intelligent. You could call it pure

Miller writes like a poet, with a deceptive simplicity – his sentences and images are intense distillations, conjuring the fleeting details of existence with clarity. He is also a very humane writer, whose philosophy is tempered always with an understanding of the flaws and failings of ordinary people . . . Pure defies the ordinary conventions of storytelling, slipping dream-like between lucidity and a kind of abstracted elusiveness . . . As Miller proves with this dazzling novel, it is not certainty we need but courage

A work of beauty embroidered by Miller’s exquisite gift for poetic description . . . it is a delight. And though a historical novel with decay its running theme, the writing is dazzlingly fresh and modern

A pacey, well-constructed narrative in which rape, suicide, love and unexplained deaths all play a part. Miller wears his learning lightly and infuses his story with humanity and warmth

The book pulls off an ambitious project: to evoke a complex historical period through a tissue of deftly selected details

Very atmospheric . . . Although the theme may sound macabre, Miller’s eloquent novel overflows with vitality and colour. It is packed with personal and physical details that evoke 18th-century Paris with startling immediacy . . . If you enjoyed Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, you’ll love this

Alive to the dramatic possibilities offered by late-18th-century Paris, a fetid and intoxicating city on the brink of revolution . . . Miller intimately and pacily imagines how it might have felt to witness it

Miller generates dynamic comedy and drama from juxtaposing the earthy, bodily realities of the Enlightenment against lofty aspirations of reason and progress. It’s engrossing historical fiction

Some stories are too wonderful – too filled with wonders – to set in the present. They can’t really be called historical fiction because they don’t serve history so much as plunder it to invent what might have been. Such is the case with Pure