Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tate Memorial Prize for Fiction. He has since written five novels including Casanova and Oxygen, which was a finalist for the Whitbread Award and the Booker Prize in 2001. He lives in Somerset England.
Praise for Pure "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."
--The New York Times Book Review "This smart reimagining of the
groundwork just before France burst into flames is something to
savor."
--The Washington Post "Andrew Miller...is another Hilary Mantel.
Pure [is] elegantly written and intricately constructed, with an
ending that, like those mirrors at Versailles, cleverly reflects
the beginning."
--The New York Times "Such is a wonder of good fiction, when a
topic and a tale of which we are ignorant can-through simple ink
symbols on paper-acquire an urgency that casts the rest of our
daily rounds in shadow."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer "One of the most brilliant aspects of
Miller's writing is his ability to question unobtrusively, through
style alone, sentimentality about both life under the Bourbons and
the creative destruction of revolution...he has an instinctive
knack for casting bright similes, never overextended, that ripple
suggestively...The writing throughout is crystalline, uncontrived,
striking and intelligent. You could call it pure."
--Jonathan Beckman, Literary Review "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 ...
Miller's newly minted sentences are arresting, often unsettling and
always thought-provoking. 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."
--The Telegraph "Quietly powerful, consistently surprising, Pure is
a fine addition to substantial body of work...pre-revolutionary
Paris is evoked in pungent detail...By concentrating on the bit
players and byways of history, Miller conjures up an eerily
tangible vanished world."
--Suzi Feay, Financial Times "Murder, rape, seduction and madness
impel this elegant novel...Within this physical and political
decay, Miller couches the heart of the matter: how to live one's
life with personal integrity, with a purity not so much morally
unblemished as unalloyed with the fads and opinions of
society...Miller populates Baratte's quest for equanimity with lush
and tart characters, seductively fleshed out, who collectively help
to deliver the bittersweet resolution of his professional and
personal travails."
--James Urquhart, Independent "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.
Above all he brings off that difficult trick of making the reader
care about an unsymapthetic character. If you enjoyed Patrick
Suskind's Perfume, you'll love this."
--Daily Express "It is an audacious novelist who can so knowingly
prefigure the symbolism at the heart of his own work without
threatening the success of the entire enterprise. It is fortunate,
then, that Miller is a writer of subtlety and skill...Unlike many
parables, however, Pure is neither laboured nor leaden. 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."
--Clare Clark, Guardian "Almost dreamlike, a realistic fantasy, a
violent fairytale for adults."
--Brian Lynch, Irish Times "Enthralling...superbly researched,
brilliantly narrated and movingly resolved."
--Robert McCrum, The Observer
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