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The Land in Winter

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The Land in Winter

By: Andrew Miller
Narrated by: Andrew Miller
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About this listen

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

December 1962, the West Country.

In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. 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, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, 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 he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering.

There is affection - if not always love - in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards - a true winter, the harshest in living memory - 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, could you run to?©2024 Andrew Miller (P)2024 Hodder & Stoughton Limited Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Small Town & Rural World Literature Marriage Funny Winter

Critic reviews

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)
Perfect (Rachel Cooke)
Delicate and devastating . . . a brilliant novel, but wrap your emotions up tight because Miller steers it expertly towards a desolate, distressing ending (Martin Chilton)
A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose (Hephzibah Anderson)
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 (Lucy Scholes)
Beautifully done (James Walton)
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 (Joanne Finney)
Sentence after sentence, The Land in Winter is beautifully intricate, deeply moving, and utterly absorbing (Claire Fuller, author of UNSETTLED GROUND)
I loved it from the first line. The Land in Winter is going to be such an important book - one that we need now. The relentless dignity and vulnerability of ordinary work in the aftermath of horror - the eggs still need scrambling and the cows milking no matter what - and the rough and awkward work of love as part of the same picture feels absolutely essential. It was gently and startlingly beautiful (Jenn Ashworth, author of GHOSTED)
[T]akes the delight that all great historical fiction does in putting together for us the pieces, small and large, of a lost world. An exquisite achievement, luminously written, full of wonder at the diversity and strangeness of human experience. (Francis Spufford, author of CAHOKIA JAZZ)
All stars
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Andrew Miller is such an elegant writer. He can conjure life and hidden emotions so effortlessly. Here he evokes a time past that is so far way and yet so near. It's a very English tale of roiling emotions beneath the permafrost of mundane country life. It is brilliantly observed and ultimately very moving.

Totally immersive tale of lost souls in the winter of 1963

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A really atmospheric listen - the tone of the narrator was wonderful: calm and even. The four key characters were revealed and developed slowly. A beautifully written novel.

The shifting narrative

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Miller has a heajtiful way with words. All his novels are entirely different yet they share this gift of language which describes subtle shifts in mood and behaviour with such concise skill

A master of language

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Excellent characterisations. A class system outdated now. Nostalgic in its description of life in the early sixties.

Descriptions of a land gripped by winter.

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A beautifully and gently read story which I found thought provoking and compelling. The lives of the characters were skilfully interwoven and linked by the place and time in which they all lived.

A beautiful book, perfect for winter

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A visceral excavation of dreams from their tethered places. Unearthed vivid memories for someone now in her 60’s.

A visceral excavation

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I recall this winter at the beginning of New Year 1963; it lasted for three months during which it seemed like it would never end. The novel creates the amazing effect of snow, its beauty, but also the problems it created for human beings, trying to get on with their lives. The story builds in intensity and you know the lives of the characters will never be the same again.

A powerful evocation of an extraordinary winter.

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I have loved all Andrew Miller's books. This one in particular is very touching. The land heavy with snow, two women heavy with child, a story of people striving for happiness during an exceptionally cold long winter. by the time the thaw comes all their lives will have changed.

heavy with snow and beautiful

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Beautifully written and compelling - a masterclass in storytelling, character and language. I was utterly engrossed by this novel and loved the narration by the author which added so much to the experience of listening. Now to buy the novel to pore over the genius of the imagery and story a second time.

Astonishing and deeply affecting

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Hauntingly atmospheric with compelling characters and a perfect pace. I loved this book-narration was excellent too

Loved this

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