Andrew Miller

‘A master of nuance, expert at exploring the various chambers of the human heart… in The Land in Winter, Miller turns to the difficulty of loving in an unlovely world.’ Rachel Seiffert, The Guardian.
Andrew Miller’s brilliantly nuanced novel, set in Somerset during the freezing winter of 1962, has drawn fulsome praise from critics, readers and fellow authors alike. Samantha Harvey, 2024 Booker Prize winner, and the Literary Society’s guest speaker in Sherborne Abbey last August, described it as ‘a novel that hits your cells and can be felt there… superb’, while this year’s Booker panel hailed it as ‘a joy to read, a nerve-shredding pleasure.’
Miller has taken four elegantly crafted characters, confined them in a snowy West Country wasteland and drawn us deep into their inner lives. The legacy of World War Two looms over the novel, and yet there is a sense that huge change awaits around the corner, especially for the two pregnant wives, who spend most of their time restricted to their domestic sphere, waiting.
The four characters are drawn from very different backgrounds and, on the surface, have little in common, yet their lives become tightly intertwined. Eric Parry is the Oxford-educated local doctor, outwardly cautious and respectable, but caught up in an affair with a glamorous local housewife, Alison Riley. His wife, Irene, is a middle-class, houseproud young woman who struggles to gain and retain her husband’s appreciation and faces an isolated existence far from her parents. Bill, the Parrys’ neighbour, is the son of a rich immigrant businessman. However, disillusioned by his father’s sleazy moneymaking schemes, Bill is attempting to make it as a dairy farmer, with few resources and little experience. Rita, his wife, comes from a working-class background. We learn that she met Bill when working for the Bristol agency that sold him the farm but had a previous life as a nightclub dancer. Her mental health issues and colourful past give her an extra layer of complexity and otherness.
This, Andrew Miller’s ninth novel, was not only shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize but also won the 2025 Walter Scott Award for Historical Fiction. Previous novels have been award winners too: His first, Ingenious Pain, published in 1997, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. That was followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2001 and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, 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 and The Slowworm’s Song.
In a recent interview with Helen Babb, the Somerset author explained what had inspired The Land in Winter: ‘An anecdote of my mother’s that rattled around in my head for many years. Also, a wish to reach back to a period that was right at the furthest stretch of what I could in any way claim to remember. And to try to make a certain kind of novel – lots of flow and momentum, and full of narrative pleasures.’
The novel certainly has momentum. It explores not only the two marriages under pressure but also other friendships and relationships. The two male protagonists appear hidebound by their relationships with their respective fathers, whilst their wives form an unlikely but fruitful friendship. Other relationships are unhappy, distant or fleeting: Eric’s affair with Alison is superficial; Rita’s father is confined in the psychiatric hospital nearby, and Irene’s glamorous older sister and confidante is far away in the United States.
Miller’s lucid style and skilled use of voice are deeply satisfying and intriguing. He manages to present the reader with a rapid succession of compelling characters and give us an insight into all of them through his skilful switching of perspective, all whilst remaining in third person. This masterful handling of voice, paired with his ability to pick out a few striking details and use these to construct a character or setting in a handful of sentences, is remarkable.
Also remarkable is his use of imagery. Notable examples include his atmospheric description of the nightlights in the psychiatric ward in the opening chapter, ‘which dropped their glow like molten wax’; Eric’s near out-of-body experience when visiting a dying patient, comparing himself with ‘a deep sea diver in a Harris tweed jacket and brogues exploring the wreck of a modest pleasure craft’; the visceral depiction of the ‘blood-warm smears of perfume’ on Alison’s rash love note, which undoes them both, and Bill’s impression of his huge, impotent bull, on which he has wasted such precious resources: ‘its blackness bleeding into the air, unmoving, as if swallowed by its own mythology.’ Simpler images stay with the reader too: ‘lilacs plump in a glass, the heavy smell of grass’ and the ‘thick blue paper’ in which the spaghetti is wrapped, so redolent of the 1960s.
The weather itself becomes an omnipresent character in the novel. Before the snow comes, the ubiquitous fog, the ‘coil of fog… the dissolving weave of the fog…the morning light seeping down like cream through muslin…stray sheets clung on the shrouded trees’. The haziness caused by the fog foreshadows the lack of connection between Eric and Irene; Bill and his father; Rita and reality.
This is a beautiful but perturbing book, which leaves an indelible mark on readers. As the Booker panel conclude: ‘How to live: that’s the big human issue, and it forms the spine of the book.’