The Land In Winter: Longlisted For The Booker Prize 2025

⭐ Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 ⭐

⭐ Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 ⭐
⭐ Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025 ⭐

A book of the year for the Independent, Guardian, i Newspaper, Good Housekeeping
'Has an uncanny beauty and depth... A novel that travels into the darkest places of history and the strangest corners of the human mind'
GUARDIAN

'Money, class, love: all of life is in there'
SUNDAY TIMES

'Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect... Superb'
SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital

'Incredibly satisfying'
FINANCIAL TIMES

'A classic in the making'
ELIZABETH DAY, author of How to Fail and One of Us


DECEMBER 1962, THE WEST COUNTRY.

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, 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 where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering.

But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, 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, can you run to?


More praise for The Land in Winter
'Perfect'
OBSERVER

'Delicate and devastating'
I PAPER

'A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose'
MAIL ON SUNDAY

'Beautifully done'
THE TIMES

'I loved The Land in Winter . . . There were moments I thought of Penelope Fitzgerald... A thing of rare beauty'
RACHEL JOYCE, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

'An exquisite achievement, luminously written, full of wonder at the diversity and strangeness of human experience.'
FRANCIS SPUFFORD, author of Golden Hill

'Disruptive and graceful beyond anything I've read'
SARAH HALL, author of Helm

'Sentence after sentence, The Land in Winter is beautifully intricate, deeply moving, and utterly
absorbing'
CLAIRE FULLER, author of Unsettled Ground


Praise for Andrew Miller
'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight'
HILARY MANTEL

'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind'
SUNDAY TIMES

'A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts'
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

'A highly intelligent writer, both exciting and contemplative'
THE TIMES

'A wonderful storyteller'
SPECTATOR

'A delicate and devastating novel . . . The novel captures in beautiful, thought-provoking style a vivid moment in England's past' - 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' - Guardian

'Perfect' - Observer

'Delicate and devastating . . . a brilliant novel, but wrap your emotions up tight because Miller steers it expertly towards a desolate, distressing ending' - Independent

'A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose' - 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' - Financial Times

'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 writing is stunning and the details of the 1960s setting are particularly evocative. Another psychologically rich novel from one of my favourite writers' - 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' - Guardian

'Beautifully done' - 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' - Good Housekeeping

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

'A beautifully written, slow-burn portrait of a moment and place in time, it excavates the intricacies of the human heart' - The Bookseller

'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.' - 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

'This has the feel of an instant classic.' - Publishers Weekly

SPECIFICATIONS:

Author:Andrew Miller - Эндрю Миллер

Publisher:Hodder

Language:English

Publication Date:2025

Number of pages:384 pst

Format:Paperback

Width:128 mm / 5'

Height:196 mm / 7,7'

Weight:335 g

ISBN:9781529354300