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by Andrew Miller
Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, The Land in Winter is a deft, page-turning examination of married life and a masterclass in storytelling from Booker-shortlisted author Andrew Miller.
December 1962: In an English village deep in the West Country, two couples on neighboring farms begin their day. Local doctor Eric Parry, keeping secrets, commences his daily rounds to patients; his pregnant wife, Irene, lies in the warmth of their cottage, mulling over the detachment that has somehow sprung up between them in the past few years.
Across from her and over the adjacent field, in a farmhouse that is never warm enough, sits Irene's mirror image. Funny but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting; she spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer's wife, while her head is still full of images of a raucous past life that her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy they live on—a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself apart from the shady workings of his father.
When Rita and Irene meet across the long bare field between their homes, a clock starts. There is affection—if not always love—in both houses: 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. Over one historic winter in a land still underpinned by the shadow of the last world war, Andrew Miller proves himself yet again as one of Britain's most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.
Book Club Reading List 2026
...a and Sunny by Kiran Desai Sep 9 - Flesh by David Szalay Oct 14 - North Woods by Daniel Mason Nov 17 - The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits Dec 9 - The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
-Anne_Glasgow
2025 Booker Shortlist announced
...lives The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/22852/the-land-in-winter The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/20170/flesh Flesh by David Szalay What do you think? Are any of these on y...
-kim.kovacs
Booker Longlist announced!
I have The Safekeep on my shelf to read. I also loved Andrew Miller's Pure, so I'll give The Land in Winter a go.
-Kelly_S
"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)
"Magnificent...Miller delves deep in a way that's rare for contemporary fiction. That may seem like a nice way of saying that this is old—fashioned storytelling, but it's the good kind of old—fashioned, patient and thoughtful and generous rather than antiquated...Fans of the literary slow build will be dazzled." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Psychologically acute…For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives...gripping." —Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"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." —Financial Times (UK)
"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
"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
This information about The Land in Winter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andrew Miller is one of Britain's leading novelists. He has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. His bestselling novel Pure, a Costa Book Award winner, has received widespread acclaim and was a best-seller for Europa in 2012. The Land in Winter is his tenth novel.
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