Book review: The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre, £20)

I first admired Andrew Miller’s lyrical, atmospheric prose when I read his earlier novel, PURE, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2011. His latest book, THE LAND IN WINTER (Sceptre, £20) is currently sitting on the Shortlist for The Booker Prize 2025. I bought it before the nomination, mainly because I was intrigued by its time frame: the novel is set in the freezing winter of 1962/1963, a period which has always intrigued me. As the novel progresses, the cold, the snow, the dulled light, the silence, all conspire to create an extraordinary sense of suffocation. This creates the perfect backdrop to the novel’s main focus: the marriages of two couples, put under the microscope (with perfect symmetry, each of the wives is pregnant with their first child). The prose is sublime. This is one of those books that makes me want to whip out my pen, and underline individual sentences. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the announcement to see if THE LAND IN WINTER wins The Booker Prize 2025. It certainly gets my vote.

THE LAND IN WINTER by Andrew Miller (Sceptre, £20)