Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a well qualified yet naïve young engineer, is sent to oversee the removal of the many thousands of bodies from the cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris, some 4 years before the French Revolution. This is the story of the unsettling year he spent there, dealing firstly with the foul conditions engendered by the over-spilling burial ground, the locals who despite everything, remained attached to the staus quo, the hard-to control and understand Flemish miners hired to do the work of exhuming and moving the cadavers, and the - to Baratte - wholly unfamiliar world of personal relationships particularly with women.

Miller conjures a vivid picture of the daily round in this little part of eighteenth century Paris: the smells, whether of sour breath or rotting vegetables or a dusty church; and of a world about to change, in the destruction of the cemetery and church which has for so long been at the heart of the community Baratte finds himself in. Violence and death are ever present.

Unsettled by the narrative, the reader is left with an impression of a world about to change, a world which is already changing in ways its citizens cannot comprehend. Uncertainty is what draws the reader in.
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Fun reading about the previous life of an area of Paris I know well! ( )

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young engineer, is tasked with demolishing an old cemetery in Paris, but the whole experience does not turn out the way his rational engineering mind expects. ( )

This was really well written but I just couldn't get into it. I did for a little in the middle but the beginning and end both lost me. Not sure why, exactly. ( )

When I look back not a great deal happened but the superb characterisation was compelling reading and I liked the way the author changed styles after a momentous event had a profound effect on the main character. The historical detail was excellent. ( )