THE LAND IN WINTER

Andrew Miller‘s first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997; it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award in 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, The Slowworm’s Song and The Land in Winter, which won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2025. Andrew Miller’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

“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)

“In Miller’s exquisitely written book, every scene is hypnotic. Here is a writer of such intimate and insightful prose that stealing away with him for a few hours in another world feels closer to trespassing than reading…The snow will eventually stop falling. The temperature will rise… But when this crisis passes, the land will show what’s been done. That’s the thing about ice–and great writing: As it crystallizes, it grips slowly, quietly, with crushing impact.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post

“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

“In the depths of Britain’s coldest winter, two neighbouring women forge a friendship in the countryside. It’s 1962 and they have both just become pregnant. Around them, the men are struggling: maimed by father figures, haunted by the past, hampered by the destructiveness of their own desires. As a winter storm wreaks havoc on their lives, these characters become pivotal figures in a community precariously balanced between history and future: between the damage wrought by the war and the freedom for women that lies ahead. In beautifully atmospheric prose, Andrew Miller brings suspense and mystery to this seemingly inconsequential chapter in British history.” —The 2025 Booker Prize Judges

. Miller has set a novel on the verge of great change; it’s the 1960s before it’s the 1960s. The contraceptive pill has arrived but for married women only. The Beatles are touring but are just another band playing small clubs. Great social change is beginning, particularly for women, but Irene and Rita’s lives still feel limited. What struck you about their friendship? How does their one outing together reveal their differences in both class and their lives at home?

2. Early in the novel, Eric imagines that love “might just mean a willingness to imagine another’s life.” If this is the case, which characters—if any—do you think succeed in loving one another? Which do not?

3. As much as the Big Freeze makes up the setting of The Land in Winter, so does the recent horror of World War II—something that skillfully underpins the story though Miller rarely points the lens directly towards this knowledge. In what ways do you see the characters (who would have been children and teenagers during the war) affected by this?

4. In his suicide note, Stephen Sorey writes that human beings are “addicted to violence.” Do you think this is true, in the world of the novel?

5. For Miller, writing is “how you transform yourself, others, the world. It’s your politics. It’s a kind of revolution.” What revolution occurs in The Land in Winter? What “moral,” if any, did the novel leave you with?

6. Towards the end of Part One, Irene throws an elaborately planned party that much of the village attends. It’s a raucous affair that seems a quintessential snapshot of the 1960s, but it’s also the only part of the novel in which all of the main players are in the same place. This is the calm before the storm both literally and figuratively—the threads are beginning to fray. At what points during this night do the lives of Irene, Rita, Eric, and Bill begin to unravel?

7. The snow, which acts with such powerful force on each of the characters’ lives, is described in the novel’s last sentence as “meaningless.” Do you think the winter itself is portrayed as something with agency?

8. Andrew Miller has said that his characters undergo “a Hamlet-like struggle towards a moment of being able to act decisively.” What events lead towards this moment for Bill, Eric, Irene, and Rita? Do you think the novel’s conclusion is inevitable, the end result of an inescapable buildup? Might things have turned out differently?

9. Much has been made of what swims under the surface of Miller’s work. For this novel, he notes it as an attempt to convey the experience of a moment, of a specific period of time. “I remember as a schoolboy,” says Miller, “there being a sort of dare whereby you pressed the tip of your tongue against the terminals of a battery. You got a little shock, not particularly painful, but it made you cry out. That ‘cry’, perhaps, is what I’ve tried to get down on the pages here.” What do you think The Land in Winter is about?