"Pure" by Andrew Miller

Winner of the 2011 Costa Book Award and shortlisted for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Jean-Baptiste, a young engineer, is commanded by a minister at the Palace of Versailles to oversee the destruction of the ancient cemetery of Les Innocents next to Les Halles in only-just-pre-revolutionary Paris. All around the area is a strange miasma. There are reports of weird sightings. Things go bump in the night. Many of those living in the locality are hostile to the project.

He meets many strange characters. He is billeted with the Monnards and their mad daughter. Armand is the organist in the derelict graveyard church; he has revolutionary friends. Jeanne is the virginal granddaughter of the sexton. The priest in the church is a recluse, blinded by the Chinese whilst doing missionary work. Heloise is the local whore; she loves reading.

J-B recruits his best friend and a troop of miners, one of whom is a mystery man, and they begin to excavate the bones.

A very strange book, a comedy of manners set amidst corpses.

November 2012; 342 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Miller also won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for his novel The Land in Winter