The Land in Winter

the 2025 Booker Prize-shortlisted 'word-of-mouth favourite' - Financial Times

By: Andrew Miller

Narrated by: Andrew Miller

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025

Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025

December 1962, the West Country.
Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering.

But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.

Where do you hide when you can't leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?©2024 Andrew Miller

Critic reviews

Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect, also seismic. Cinematic at times, and at others painterly. The Land in Winter is a novel that hits your cells and can be felt there, without your brain really knowing what's happened to it. Superb (Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of ORBITAL)

A delicate and devastating novel . . . The novel captures in beautiful, thought-provoking style a vivid moment in England's past (The 20 best books of the year)

Finally, a recent publication that deserves the widest attention. Andrew Miller is known for acute and unnerving historical novels such as Pure and Ingenious Pain, but in The Land in Winter, a study of two young marriages during England's 1962-3 Big Freeze, he may have written his best book yet. The shadows of madness, and of the second world war, extend into a world on the cusp of enormous social change. Miller conjures his characters and their times with a subtle brilliance that is not to be missed (The best fiction of 2024)

Perfect (Rachel Cooke)

Delicate and devastating . . . a brilliant novel, but wrap your emotions up tight because Miller steers it expertly towards a desolate, distressing ending (Martin Chilton)

A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose (Hephzibah Anderson)

Miller is on superb form here as he portrays the everyday lives of country doctor Eric and farmer Bill and their respective wives, Irene and Rita, both of whom are expecting their first child. This is a story of conformity and conflict - against the elements, societal changes and the characters' sense of themselves. That inner turmoil is brilliantly crafted, and the depiction of the local asylum in particular is chilling in every sense

This is a quiet book about quiet lives; internal turmoil trumping external drama. But the delicate attention Miller affords his characters' inner lives makes for incredibly satisfying reading. Also notable is his elegant, measured prose . . . You can sink into this novel as one would into freshly driven powdery snow (Lucy Scholes)

Expertly layered and so acutely rendered it makes you shiver, this is a breathtaking book from one of our most underrated novelists (The 14 most underrated books of 2024)

The writing is stunning and the details of the 1960s setting are particularly evocative. Another psychologically rich novel from one of my favourite writers (20 best books of the year)

Deeply evocative . . . a memorable slice of historical fiction

Psychologically acute . . . For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives . . . gripping

The voice of the narrator/ author..

I think, deep down, that this is a wonderful novel, absorbing and real. However, it’s going to take a second listening to increase involvement.. The author’s actual voice and tone brought integrity and honesty which compels me, as a listener to listen again.

Exquisite

A story that comes along only once in a while. Not to miss. Highly recommended if you love analysis of human psyche.