I was most excited about reading Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter from the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist. It seemed like just the book I was yet to read in my life – an atmospheric historical novel about how a major climate event affected individual lives.

At the end of 400 pages, I’m not sure how I feel.

There is beauty and commitment, grandeur and skill, and yet…

The coldest winter

Set in the ghastly English winters of 1962–63, the novel harks back to a time which is still living memory. It is perhaps not entirely correct to call the novel “historical” fiction but it is likely that the exceptional phenomenon has assumed legendary proportions in the English memory – this makes for solid ground for fiction. During such events, facts and memories coalesce into stories that are as much testament to history as they are of myth-making and epic fables of survival.

The 60s of Miller’s novel is nothing like the 60s of popular imagination – there is no Beatles here; this is a society still grappling with the monumental effects of the wars, always on the verge of poverty and hunger. There is something almost prehistoric about this England – electricity is scarce, the countryside feels hostile, and the agrarian economy is still manual labour-intensive. It’s a cold, black-and-white world of extreme hardship. The only luxury in the drudgery seems to be those from movies – Hollywood imports – that the women in the novel indulge in from time to time.

The Land in Winter follows two married young couples, Eric and Irene Parry and Bill and Rita Simmons, living in the countryside. Eric is the village doctor and Irene has traded her city life to be with him. Bill is a farmer with regular ambitions – he is eager to make his business a success. Rita was a dancer/escort before she married Bill, and has a history of mental illness in her family. The two women, young, bored, lonely, and pregnant, become friends. Their friendship entails hanging out at each other’s homes, going to the movies, and chatting about the lives they had left behind.

The isolation – both of the community and its inhabitants – reaches a stifling peak when the snow refuses to let up and disrupts normal life. Confined to their homes with nothing to do, this leads to the inevitable – and horrifying – moment at a gathering when all truths must be reckoned with.

Cold and aloof

What Miller gets right is the setting and the atmosphere. The descriptions of brutal winter make the reader long for warmth, its dreariness weighing on the bones. He is also impressive in his recreation of life on the farm – the endless toil, the dirt and grime… He seems interested in the minutiae of daily life, as is evident in the chatter of the two women or the special care he takes to recreate what the scenes in a kitchen or bedroom might have been during that apocalyptic winter.

And yet, for all the skills of the author and the novelty of the idea, The Land in Winter is rather boring. I’m a fairly fast reader and it was surprising to me that I took as long as a week to finish this novel. It made for a curious experience – I read page after page without really enjoying, and re-read, worried that I was missing out on something. In effect, I read the novel twice over without really feeling anything.

For a novel (partly) about young unhappy couples, I had to try very hard to care about the Parrys and the Simmonses. The characters in individual capacities are more interesting than they are with their spouses. Irene and Rita make a more charming pair – their friendship a source of warmth in a novel about a frigid winter. I could not empathise with Eric, though, and to me, it was Bill who had the most arresting storyline – and he has a mad, immigrant family and a shady father to thank for that.

What did not work for me in The Land in Winter was how cold (pardon my lazy pun) and unsentimental it felt. The marriages already seemed tired and bitter, but more grievously, the four characters exist on the emotional plane as strangers to each other, their individual stories a tad more interesting than their collective ordeal. Unfortunately, the reader might get this feeling very early on and proceed to abandon all will to productively engage with a Booker Prize-approved novel.

The Land in Winter, Andrew Miller, Sceptre.

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