The Land in Winter - by Andrew Miller (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE

WINNER
2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
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

Review Quotes

A Best Book of the Year: The Guardian・Good Housekeeping・Independent

A Boston Globe Fall 2025 Most Anticipated Book

★ "Miller is an expert juggler of dark and light, of big and small, of seen and unseen... A masterful, acute, and very British novel, revealing the tensions of a time beset by winds of change."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

★ "A stunning portrait of domestic turmoil and post-WWII unease... A spectacularly vivid sense of gloom pervades the narrative... Even keener are the author's crystalline depictions of his characters' interior lives. This has the feel of an instant classic."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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

"In the depths of Britain's coldest winter, two neighbouring women forge a friendship in the countryside. It's 1962 and they have both just become pregnant. Around them, the men are struggling: maimed by father figures, haunted by the past, hampered by the destructiveness of their own desires. As a winter storm wreaks havoc on their lives, these characters become pivotal figures in a community precariously balanced between history and future: between the damage wrought by the war and the freedom for women that lies ahead. In beautifully atmospheric prose, Andrew Miller brings suspense and mystery to this seemingly inconsequential chapter in British history."--The 2025 Booker Prize Judges

"The writing is masterful, and the prose has all the richness and evocativeness of poetry. Like all great novels, it stays with you long after the final page has turned. Read slowly, if you can, to savour this work of desolate beauty."--Historical Novels Review

"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. 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

"With each new novel, Andrew Miller revitalizes the form and takes the reader to extraordinary new places. 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."--Sarah Hall, author of Burntcoat

"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 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 realized physical world they inhabit. Andrew Miller allows us into their houses and their minds - 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."--The Bookseller, Editor's Choice

"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

"Perfect."--Rachel Cooke, Observer

"A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose." Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

"Incredibly satisfying."--Financial Times

"Beautifully done."--James Walton, The Times

"Moving... 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

"Psychologically acute... For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives... gripping."--Times Literary Supplement

"Miller works magic, bringing to life not just human relations, but the Sixties too, before they began to swing."--Saga Magazine

"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, this is not a bleak book."--Rachel Seiffert, Guardian

"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."--Lucy Scholes, Financial Times

"Deeply evocative... a memorable slice of historical fiction."--Daily Mail

"Expertly layered and so acutely rendered it makes you shiver, this is a breathtaking book from one of our most underrated novelists."--i Newspaper, The 14 Most Underrated Books of 2024

"Miller may have written his best book yet... brilliance that is not to be missed."--Guardian, The Best Fiction of 2024

"A delicate and devastating novel... The novel captures in beautiful, thought-provoking style a vivid moment in England's past."--Independent, The 20 Best Books of the Year