The Land in Winter
the 2025 Booker Prize-shortlisted 'word-of-mouth favourite' - Financial Times
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- 6,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
⭐ SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025⭐
'Graceful, atmospheric, enormously satisfying'
SARAH JESSICA PARKER, BOOKER JUDGE 2025
'I love The Land in Winter so much... It's really, really, really, really good'
GILLIAN ANDERSON
'A classic in the making'
ELIZABETH DAY
'One of the best writers at work today'
TELEGRAPH
'Has an uncanny beauty and depth'
GUARDIAN
'Money, class, love: all of life is in there'
SUNDAY TIMES
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?
More praise for The Land in Winter
⭐ Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 ⭐
⭐ Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025 ⭐
'Perfect'
OBSERVER
'Delicate and devastating'
I PAPER
'Incredibly satisfying'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose'
MAIL ON SUNDAY
'I loved The Land in Winter . . . There were moments I thought of Penelope Fitzgerald... A thing of rare beauty'
RACHEL JOYCE, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
'An exquisite achievement, luminously written, full of wonder at the diversity and strangeness of human experience.'
FRANCIS SPUFFORD, author of Golden Hill
Praise for Andrew Miller
'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight'
HILARY MANTEL
'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind'
SUNDAY TIMES
'A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts'
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
'A highly intelligent writer, both exciting and contemplative'
THE TIMES
'A wonderful storyteller'
SPECTATOR
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Miller (The Slowworm's Song) offers a stunning portrait of domestic turmoil and post-WWII unease. The story opens in 1962, when London transplant Irene Parry, the dissatisfied wife of country doctor Eric, befriends her neighbor Rita Simmons. Rita is married to Bill, who is attempting to distance himself from his father, a Polish immigrant turned London slumlord whose shady dealings made the family wealthy. As the year progresses, Miller lays out the dilemmas both couples are facing, including Eric's guilt over a patient's death and his affair with a local woman, Bill's need for money to expand his farm and unwillingness to ask his father for a loan, and the two women's unexpected pregnancies. When a blizzard hits the region in the new year, the novel's pacing shifts from languid to rapid-fire, as Irene discovers a note from Eric's lover and tries to leave for London but gets stuck in the snow. Meanwhile, Bill is away, having finally gone to London to beg his father for money, and Rita, whose own father was committed to an asylum, has a mental breakdown while alone in the house. A spectacularly vivid sense of gloom pervades the narrative, whether in recurring references to the obliterating London smog, Rita's unsettling memories of her father's stories about liberating Auschwitz, or Bill's reflections on his war-profiteering father. Even keener are the author's crystalline depictions of his characters' interior lives. This has the feel of an instant classic.
