The Land in Winter

Reviews / Votes

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 * Independent * 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 * Guardian * Perfect -- Rachel Cooke * Observer * Delicate and devastating . . . a brilliant novel, but wrap your emotions up tight because Miller steers it expertly towards a desolate, distressing ending -- Martin Chilton * Independent * A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose -- Hephzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday * 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 * Observer * 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 * Financial Times * 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 * i Newspaper * 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 * Good Housekeeping * Deeply evocative . . . a memorable slice of historical fiction * Daily Mail * Psychologically acute . . . For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives . . . gripping * Times Literary Supplement * This story of two marriages brilliantly evokes the legacy of the second world war. Andrew Miller is a master of nuance, expert at exploring the various chambers of the human heart . . . For all its wintry setting and cold echoes of the past, and for all that it opens with a death in an asylum, this is not a bleak book. The people in it yearn and reach; they make mistakes, too - some of them terrible. But all the while, somehow, you feel - you hope - they might find a way through . . . In The Land in Winter, Miller's characters have looked into the abyss. It makes the ordinary business of living at once very difficult and very necessary -- Rachel Seiffert * Guardian * Beautifully done -- James Walton * The Times * Moving . . . offers a full display of Miller's gifts . . . In the white violence of the winter terrain, the narrator's voice wreaths around everything. That voice is the glory of The Land in Winter * Literary Review * Intimate . . . The writing is stunning and the details of the 1960s setting are particularly evocative. Another psychologically rich novel from one of my favourite writers -- Joanne Finney * Good Housekeeping * Miller works magic, bringing to life not just human relations, but the Sixties too, before they began to swing * Saga Magazine * With each new novel, Andrew Miller revitalises the form and takes the reader to extraordinary new places. His work is truly exploratory, never still in its ambition or human dynamics. There's always immense sensuality, disquiet, drama and wisdom in his books, but The Land in Winter is outstandingly beautiful and immersive in its storytelling. It's disruptive and graceful beyond anything I've read or could hope to write. He is the novelists' lodestar -- Sarah Hall, author of BURNTCOAT I loved The Land in Winter. I am in awe of the understanding, the grace and eloquence of it. I kept smiling to myself as I read with a kind of wonder at the sheer perception. The insideness he seemed able to find and the idea that at some point, even the most conflicted ideas touch one another. There were moments I thought of Penelope Fitzgerald - that moment I have always loved in The Beginning of Spring when the birch trees seem to grow hands - those liminal moments that are kind of beyond words, or explanation, but he finds them anyway. It's a thing of rare beauty -- Rachel Joyce, author of THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY Sentence after sentence, The Land in Winter is beautifully intricate, deeply moving, and utterly absorbing -- Claire Fuller, author of UNSETTLED GROUND I loved it from the first line. The Land in Winter is going to be such an important book - one that we need now. The relentless dignity and vulnerability of ordinary work in the aftermath of horror - the eggs still need scrambling and the cows milking no matter what - and the rough and awkward work of love as part of the same picture feels absolutely essential. It was gently and startlingly beautiful -- Jenn Ashworth, author of GHOSTED The Land in Winter is a wondrous novel about the interior lives of the occupants of two marriages, set in the intensely realised physical world they inhabit. Andrew Miller's talent is to allow us into their world - into their houses and into their minds - so that we see them both as young marrieds in an English village in the coldest winter of the twentieth century and as souls passing through the snowstorms of time -- Tim Pears, author of The West Country Trilogy A beautifully written, slow-burn portrait of a moment and place in time, it excavates the intricacies of the human heart -- Editor's Choice * The Bookseller * [T]akes the delight that all great historical fiction does in putting together for us the pieces, small and large, of a lost world. An exquisite achievement, luminously written, full of wonder at the diversity and strangeness of human experience. -- Francis Spufford, author of CAHOKIA JAZZ Miller's tale of two young couples in the West Country who get snowed in during the big freeze of 1962-63 has an uncanny beauty and depth [...] a novel that travels into the darkest places of history and the strangest corners of the human mind. -- Summer reading: the 50 hottest books to read now * The Guardian * Set during the freezing winter of 1962, this psychologically interior novel from a master of the form centres on two married couples. . . who are forced to re-examine their lives when a blizzard cuts off their homes from the outside world. * The Telegraph * [T]ravels deep into the hearts of its characters, two young married couples in the West Country. This novel has had my heart since it was published last November. . . it's the best book yet from a stellar writer * The Guardian * This chilly, brilliant novel is Miller at his best. * The Observer * Profound and moving and exquisitely written . . . A classic in the making -- Elizabeth Day, author of HOW TO FAIL and MAGPIE This has the feel of an instant classic. * Publishers Weekly * It's the literary duel of the autumn. This year's six-strong Booker Prize shortlist, announced on Tuesday at London's Southbank Centre, is one of the most consistently brilliant in years - but two writers still emerge neck-and-neck above the others: Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai...[The Land in Winter is] a beautifully atmospheric snapshot of two marriages during Britain's "Big Freeze" of 1962, and further proof that he's one of the best writers at work on these islands today... Told across four wholly different perspectives, it's ostensibly about an unconventional friendship between Rita, a farmer's wife, and Irene, a doctor's - neighbours who bond over their pregnancies and absent husbands. But it's more broadly about a 1960s that isn't yet swinging, stuck, instead, between delicate to-and-fros over gender and class. The Second World War is hardly mentioned, but you feel its aftermath, its grip. As with good historical fiction, you always know where you are, without being explicitly told. Go and buy The Land in Winter, read it for yourself. Desai's novel will win many hearts, but Miller's should win the Booker Prize. * Daily Telegraph * Atmospheric...His elegant, old-fashioned storytelling really conjures up postwar England. It feels like a cross between the works of Shena Mackay and Penelope Fitzgerald - in the most satisfying ways. * The Times * Social faultlines are everywhere in Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter, set in the West Country during the punishing winter of 1962. Miller moves hypnotically between the surface of things - the work of a rural GP, of an inexperienced dairy farmer, of a woman discovering the demands and empty stretches of housewifery - and the deep currents of their desires. The two couples at the centre of the novel are as frozen as the landscape in which Miller places them, but huge changes are coming for them all - and the country in which they live. -- Chris Power * The Guardian * Let's hope Andrew Miller wins for The Land in Winter, which is very wintry indeed. The man who wrote Pure and Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is worthy of the highest praise. * Spectator * A novel of suggestive lyricism and haunting moods and motifs (not least among them the unquiet ghosts of the war and its terrible crimes), brought together in a devastating denouement. * Daily Mail * If the first half of this novel is quiet, it is because Miller is building it like an impressionist canvas: tiny strokes that seem plain up close gather into something extraordinary. By the second half, the drama becomes so gripping I found myself immersed in multiple late-night reading sessions. The end result is an unforgettable book about a society on the cusp of social change, and the ordinary lives swept up in its crest. I would love to see The Land in Winter win -- Anna Bonet * i Newspaper * An elegant and finely wrought book about the disappointments and compromises that develop throughout a marriage, it has, for all its tightness of time-scale, the expansive atmosphere of Shirley Hazzard's work...Miller has rendered a study of couples' lives, on the brink of the opening out of sexual and societal freedoms, in devotedly crisp and compelling fashion; one that sustains and rewards our close attention. It's full of frustrations and stasis, controlled by artful narration. * Daily Telegraph * The lines of Andrew Miller's historical novel "The Land in Winter" fall as peacefully and lethally as snow. His plot - loneliness and adultery in a small English village - would seem to offer all the surprises of an old sweater, but in Miller's exquisitely written book, every scene is hypnotic. . . Here is a writer of such intimate and insightful prose that stealing away with him for a few hours in another world feels closer to trespassing than reading. -- Ron Charles * Washington Post * My heart was stolen by Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter, which I reread after many months. For yonks, I've been banging the drum for Miller [. . .] and I'm delighted he's getting more recognition. Miller writes fiction that seems like pretty traditional realist fare but is deceptively strange and beguiling. This novel, set in snowbound Somerset during the British Big Freeze of 1962-3, is filled with memorably weird moments involving teeth, spinning tops and even flying saucers. The slow-burn story follows two young couples who are still living in the shadow of the Second World War. Their anxieties and affairs emerge as the fog and the blizzards engulf them. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * The Times * I really enjoyed its undercurrent of weirdness that kept breaking to the surface. A skilled piece of storytelling -- Robbie Millen * The Times * Andrew Miller's shortlisted novel, set in rural England during the brutal winter of 1963, has become a word-of-mouth favourite. It's an intimate portrait of two marriages in trouble, at a time when the second world war was still fresh, and the great upheaval of the 1960s was just beginning. -- Isabel Berwick * Financial Times * Of the six shortlisted novels, Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter looks like a good bet for the GBP50,000 award. It might even be a contender for best Booker novel ever . . . As well as showing us what these two families do and say, Miller renders their inner lives with uncommon depth and precision, taking us into each character's private, complex world and charting their secrets, memories, quiet desperation, hopes and fears . . . When things happen - and they do happen - they come out of nowhere with life's own suddenness and send you reeling. The final pages of this novel are astonishing and shocking, but also deeply satisfying. As you close the covers and step back into your own day, the story's full meaning settles. Its wisdom and tenderness leaving you quietly heartened and perhaps a touch gentler. -- Jim Lawley * The Spectator * I love The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller so much, it's a very special book. I've listened to Andrew reading the audiobook twice already, which is quite a lot considering that I don't have a lot of time to read lately because I'm so busy - so the fact that I've read it twice means that it's really, really, really, really good. -- Gillian Anderson, author of WANT: SEXUAL FANTASIES BY ANONYMOUS It is such an elegantly written novel, with sentences so finely calibrated that Miller's descriptions are infused with psychological weight. The effect is so successful that for instance, the descriptions of the weather transform a frozen landscape into a mirror of his characters' inner lives. -- Ay??bami Adebay??, author of STAY WITH ME Miller's great strength, developed over nearly 30 years, is his ability to inhabit the inner lives of his characters, no matter how historically distant from our own. In "The Land in Winter" he charts the psychological blind spots of his four principals, who are stranded between the hidebound postwar conventions of their youth and the new permissive age that lies just around the corner. . . In other hands these details could drag, but Miller builds from them a world that is as materially precise as it is psychologically stifling. -- Kathryn Hughes * New York Times * The Land In Winter is a quiet masterpiece: a beautifully observed and deeply felt novel about two couples navigating isolation and desire amid Britain's harsh winter of 1962-63. Andrew Miller's prose is elegant, atmospheric, unhurried and unforgettable. -- Gillian Anderson * Stylist * This delicately written, deeply psychological novel, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, follows two neighboring married couples through a brutal English winter in 1962. . . As the quartet's secrets and longings come to light, so, too, do traumas of the Second World War and the restless, uncomfortable dynamics of a modern age in transition. Miller's prose is gentle and luxurious, punctuated by striking imagery: snowflakes on the tongue are "stone-flavoured, the tips of the sky." He delights in interior tensions, and in the wrenching interplay between his characters and their cruel surroundings. -- The Best Books of 2025 So Far * New Yorker * Beautiful -- Andrew Marr, Books of the Year 2025 * New Statesman * With lush descriptions of places and people, and a beguiling oddness at its heart, this novel enchanted us. -- Fiction book of the year, Best Paperbacks of 2025 * The Times * It is hard to write the seasons afresh, to make the reader feel winter seeping through the pages of a book for the first time. But Andrew Miller does that, in his atmospheric The Land in Winter, set during the Big Freeze of England in 1962-63, capturing the sense of a blizzard closing in. . . Winter and Christmas novels should either cut through the marshmallow-and-candy sugariness of an over-commercialised season or, like Miller and James Joyce before him, they bring you back into the heart of winter itself -- Nilanjana Roy, Ideal winter fiction * Financial Times * A masterclass in storytelling that explores the lives of two newly married West Country couples during the harsh winter of 1962 * Country Life * Miller was a student of mine at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s, so I read his work with affectionate attention. This latest novel is worthy of the praise it's been getting. Miller always seems to chisel away at the strange emotional strata other writers have ignored. He calls this 'keeping it weird' and reading him is never a comfort read. But comfort isn't what we ask of the modern novel. Here, Miller turns the grindingly ordinary lives of West Country folk caught out by cruel weather into a compelling struggle between man - fixated on his tiny survival rituals - and his awareness of his frailty in a pitiless universe. Most memorable is the car journey of two drunken, deluded men trying to reach home, crashing and staggering about in a frozen world they utterly fail to understand. It's both funny and terrifying: Miller at his best. -- Rose Tremain, Authors' Books of the Year 2025 * Daily Mail *