{{Infobox book | name = Ingenious Pain | image = File:Ingenious Pain.jpg | border = yes | caption = First edition | author = Andrew Miller | cover_artist = | country = England | language = English | series = | genre = Bildungsroman | publisher = Sceptre | pub_date = | media_type = Print | pages = 337 | isbn = 978-0-340-68207-4 | oclc = 154247990 | dewey = | congress = | followed_by = Casanova (1998)' }}Ingenious Pain is the first novel by English author, Andrew Miller, published in 1997. Set in the mid-18th century, the novel follows the picaresque adventures of James Dyer, an Englishman born without the ability to feel pain or pleasure. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour prize for a foreign language novel. The novel was also listed on the New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" for 1997. Plot The novel opens in 1771 with the autopsy of James Dye by two gentleman surgeons keen on understanding the deceased's famed inability to feel physical pain. The pair had been given access to the corpse by the Reverend Lestrade, hunting enthusiast and vicar to a country parish. The story then rewinds to the night of James's conception on a midwinter night in 1739 when his mother is raped by a stranger while skating at night. She gives birth to an infant whose failure to cry immediately creeps everyone out. Against all expectations the baby lives, growing up to be a mute boy with an inordinately precocious countenance that disconcerts everyone, foremost of all his schoolteacher, a crippled spinster who prides herself on being an expert on children. James is discovered to be incapable of feeling pain following a fall from the top of the tree. Shortly after he surprises everyone by speaking. While recuperating from the fall an outbreak of smallpox kills his mother and two siblings, leaving him alone with his older sister Liza, the only person who has any affection for him, and his mother's distraught husband, Joshua, an impoverished yeoman. Already something of a habitual drunkard, Joshua gives himself completely to alcoholism in his grief, ultimately killing himself. James immediately departs for Bristol, leaving his Liza, who has been rendered blind by smallpox, to an undetermined fate. James searches out Marley Gummer, a veteran conman