The Land in Winter

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, Summer reads

'Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect. 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

'Delicate and devastating'
I PAPER

'Incredibly satisfying'
FINANCIAL TIMES

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


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

'Beautifully done'
THE TIMES

'Psychologically acute . . . For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives. . . gripping'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

'I loved The Land in Winter . . . 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 Miller finds them anyway. It's 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