The Land in Winter
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3.8 • 49 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE・NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE・NPR BEST BOOK OF 2025・NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025・SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025・WINNER 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction・ WINNER 2025 Winston Graham Historical Prize for Fiction
“Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect...Superb.”—Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital
December 1962: In a village deep in the English countryside, two neighboring couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric Parry commences his rounds in the village while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their old house, mulling over the space that has grown between the two of them.
On the farm nearby lives Irene’s mirror image: witty but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting. She spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer’s wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget.
When Rita and Irene meet across the bare field between their houses, a clock starts. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet to be abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way—ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory—so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.
An exquisite, page-turning examination of relationships, The Land in Winter is a masterclass in storytelling—proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of the most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.
“Andrew Miller’s writing is a source of wonder and delight.”—Hilary Mantel
“This book is really special.”—Sarah Jessica Parker, 2025 Booker Prize Judge
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This Booker Prize finalist is a quietly devastating portrait of ordinary lives tested by isolation, longing, and the slow encroachment of a coldness that’s both literal and emotional. In a Somerset village during the brutal winter of 1962–63, two neighboring couples find their fragile contentment cracking as the snow seals them off from the outside world. With his trademark precision, British author Andrew Miller (Pure) reveals how class, temperament, and desire keep middle-class transplants Eric and Irene and struggling local farmers Bill and Rita turning restlessly in their own orbits. Every gesture and silence between them feels exact, and every description glints with frostbitten clarity. What begins as an examination of domestic routine deepens into something stark and elemental. The Land in Winter is a novel about the hungers that lie beneath the surface of everyday life, and the quiet heartbreak of realizing that warmth may not return.
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.
Customer Reviews
Meaningless/nothingness
Horrid. Utterly dry and equally as boring. What a slog. It’s the sort of pretentious swill that gains accolades for no discernible reason other than that it’s been written by a condescending literary snob. You feel nothing for the characters. You long for some kind of meaning and in the end only take away that you will never ever waste life’s precious time on another book by Andrew Miller.