Winter 1962. As Britain becomes engulfed in one the coldest and longest winters on record, the lives of two newly married couples are changed in surprising and irrevocable ways.
December 1962, the West Country.
In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. 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, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, 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 he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering. There is affection - if not always love - in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards - a true winter, the harshest in living memory - 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, could you run to?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
Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, The Slowworm's Song and The Land in Winter. Andrew Miller's novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.
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