The Land in Winter

"Andrew Miller won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for The Land in Winter , in which two couples in 1960s England find their normal lives suspended by heavy snow. When I spoke to her in May, judge Katharine Grant described it as “Intense, immersive and beautifully paced.” It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year."

"In choosing the winter of 1962 when, for some weeks, life in Britain paused, suspended in heavy snow, Andrew Miller has subtly identified a moment – perhaps the moment – when we shifted from looking backwards to the Second World War which, for so many, was still the defining event of their lives, towards the future. People were still finding, and some losing, their post-war way; the sixties were not swinging yet. Down in the West Country, where The Land in Winter is set, we experience this Janus moment, this pause, this snow-suspension, with two couples negotiating themselves and their marriages. Intense, immersive and beautifully paced, we move with Bill and Rita and Eric and Irene towards an uncertain spring. Is it the way that like a great piece of music you’re hardly aware of the work that lies behind Andrew Miller’s novels? Is it the details he chooses to perfectly evoke a mood, a room, a journey, a party, a conversation? Is it that he finds a good story and offers the gift of total immersion? Is it the emotional integrity—by which I mean nothing is ever done simply for writerly effect? Is it his ability to capture a truth which you feel you’ve always known but never articulated? Different readers will have different answers."

"Set in December 1962 in the rural West Country of England, The Land in Winter follows the quiet unravelling of two neighbouring young couples during ‘the Big Freeze.’ Eric Parry, a country doctor, is married to Irene, who has left London for the countryside and already feels out of place. Though she is now pregnant, Eric’s attention is often elsewhere, preoccupied with matters beyond his growing family. Their neighbours, Bill Simmons and his wife Rita, live on a dairy farm they can barely keep afloat. Rita, once a club dancer in Bristol, is also adapting to farm life while expecting a child. Central to the story is a tense Boxing Day party hosted by the Parrys, attended by both couples and other acquaintances, including Eric’s lover and her husband. This masterfully described gathering becomes a focal point where social masks slip and hidden fractures surface. As the relentless winter continues, the couples’ isolation grows, and they forced to confront not only their relationships and surroundings but also the lingering shadows of war and past trauma. It is such an elegantly written novel, with sentences so finely calibrated that Miller’s descriptions are infused with psychological weight. The effect is so successful that for instance, the descriptions of the weather transform a frozen landscape into a mirror of his characters’ inner lives. No, I don’t think we thought about it directly. But we did observe that after the decisions had been finalised. We wanted to present what we collectively consider to be the most excellent fiction we’d read of the 153. These six wonderful books rose to the top after hours of deliberation."