Original price was: 4,00 €.2,80 €Current price is: 2,80 €.
by Andrew Miller
1 in stock
“What does the world need most–a good, ordinary man, or one who is outstanding, albeit with a heart of ice?” This is the question at the heart of Andrew Miller’s first novel, Ingenious Pain, a book set during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. The outstanding man in question is James Dyer, an English freak of nature who, since birth, has been impervious to physical pain. Not only does he feel no pain, but he recovers from all injuries in record time. By turns a shill for a quack pain-reliever at county fairs, an object of study by a wealthy collector of human oddities, and, eventually, a surgeon, James Dyer–and through him the reader–gains exposure to a panoply of 18th-century philosophical thought, medical practice, historic events, and larger-than-life rogues and heroes, both fictional and real.As a surgeon, James Dyer excels, and his inability to feel–whether physical pain himself or empathy for others–seems only to enhance his skill with a knife. James slices and dices and cures without a scintilla of compassion while his reputation grows, until at last he arrives in Russia and the mystery of his unusual quality is resolved.
Miller navigates his complicated story and exotic locales with unswerving confidence, bolstered, no doubt, by thorough research. James Dyer is not a character who invites love, but his adventures make for intelligent, deeply pleasurable reading.
-70% Off
by Charles Dickens
Dickens’s magnificent novel of guilt, desire, and redemption.
-70% Off
by Rivers Solomon
Odd-mannered, obsessive, withdrawn, Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. …
-70% Off
by Mikhail Lermontov, Paul Foote (Translator, Introduction)
In its adventurous happenings, its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues, A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and ’30s.
-70% Off
by Philip Pullman
Will is twelve years old and he’s just killed a man. Now he’s on his own, on the run, determined to discover the truth about his father disappearance.
Then Will steps through a window in the air into another world, and finds himself with a companion – a strange, savage little girl called Lyra. Like Will, she has a mission which she intends to carry out at all costs.
Login
Register
