Casanova, Andrew Miller
Casanova, Andrew Miller
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Casanova

Author: Andrew Miller

Narrator: John Sackville

Unabridged: 7 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Sceptre

Published: 07/18/2019

Synopsis

Giacomo Casanova arrives in England in the summer of 1763 at the age of thirty-eight, seeking a respite from his restless travels and liaisons. But the lure of company proves too hard to resist and the dazzlingly pretty face of young Marie Charpillon even harder. Casanova's pursuit of this elusive bewitcher drives him from exhilaration to despair and to attempt to reinvent himself in the roles of labourer, writer and country squire. Based on a little-known episode in Casanova's life, this is a scintillating, poignant, often comic portrait of a far more complex figure than legend suggests and of the decadent society in which he operated.

(P)2019 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

About 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, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. Andrew Miller's novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Katie

A fictitious account of the period Casanova spent in London when he was thirty-eight. Here he falls in love with a young beauty who is immune to his charm and lovecraft. Without question it's the beauty of the writing that is the stand out feature. Especially the descriptive writing. Miller does a g......more

Goodreads review by Issicratea

Reading this novel confirmed my feeling about Andrew Miller’s strengths and weaknesses as a novelist. Strengths: chooses wonderful subjects; writes extraordinarily well at the level of word, phrase, sentence, paragraph. Weaknesses: has no idea to do with his wonderful subjects once he has found them......more

Goodreads review by Kate

An absolutely fabulous read. Miller writes with great precision and evokes a wonderful picture of 18th century London. He does not shy away from describing the debauched and eccentric lives of his characters whilst allowing his reader to immerse themselves in their inter relationships and the wider......more

Quotes

His writing is vivid, precise and constantly surprising. I was absolutely captivated by it . . . I wish I'd written it Sunday Times

Sparkling and lavishly detailed . . . rich without being cloying; resonant of time and place while remaining fresh and modern . . . he captures brilliantly the downfall and partial redemption of this charming isolate The Times

Full-bodied yet razor-sharp . . . Period detail, which so often reveals only that the writer has commendably and carefully studied a contemporary portrait, in Miller's hands takes us into the heart of 18th-century London so that we can almost smell and touch it . . . its fetid atmosphere almost making the reader itch Spectator

Miller's prose is jewelled . . . What Casanova wrote with a swagger resurfaces here as an elegant, elegiac meditation on the death of purpose Times Literary Supplement

I was thoroughly amused, stimulated, entertained and instructed by the whole book . . . I don't think I've read anything which has brought 18th-century London so powerfully to life . . . brilliantly acute

Exquisite . . . Miller's elegant prose is laced with luxurious imagery and wry humour . . . beautifully and sensitively written Daily Telegraph

Miller is a pellucid, evocative writer: he brings alive the thick fogs over the Thames, the dreary winter countryside, the lamp-lit London streets . . . A beautiful evocation of a few months of this womaniser's life Observer

A perfectly crafted picture of 18-century London and its visiting predator in language as delicate as the tendrils of fog that curl off the Thames, and as forceful as the fetid odours conjured up in the background The Times

Andrew Miller's forte is painting verbal landscapes, laying the words just so. At times it's like a fine miniature, delicate with atmosphere and smoke and gleam Time Out

Miller again shows his mastery of historical fiction in this fine, elegiac book Sunday Telegraph

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