Andrew Miller’s new novel is vividly realized fiction played out against the rich cacophony of Paris on the cusp of the French Revolution.

Jean-Baptiste Baratte- an ambitious young engineer of modest origin- arrives in the capital in 1785, charged by the King’s minister with emptying the overflowing cemetery of Les Innocents, an ancient site whose stench is poisoning the neighborhood’s air and water.

At first Baratte sees his work as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own fate and to the demise of the social order.

Baratte cannot foresee the dramas and calamities his task will trigger, or the incident that will transform his life. As unrest against the court of Louis XVI mounts, the engineer realizes that the future he had planned may no longer be the one he wants. His assignment becomes a year of relentless effort, a year of assault and sudden death. A year of friendship, too, and of desire and love. A year unlike any other he has lived.

Andrew Miller
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 in 2025. Andrew Miller’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

• May 22 2015
  Hopeless Bibliophile: "PURE is packed to the brim with metaphor and symbolism."
  
• Sep 26 2014
  Publishers Weekly Names Andrew Miller's "Pure" One Of The Best Historical Novels
  
• Nov 26 2013
  Bookpage.com: Diane Setterfield recommends Pure
  
• Oct 15 2013
  The Cottage Book Shop: "[Pure] is not easily forgotten."
  
• Jul 29 2013
  Strange Thoughts Blog: "This is a wonderful novel."
  
• Jun 24 2013
  National Post: "...Miller has written excellent novels set in other eras, but the 18th century is his summer cottage of the imagination..."