Category: Reviews

About the Book

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?

Format: Hardcover (384 pages) Publisher: Sceptre
Publication date: 24th October 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Land in Winter is the story of two couples: Eric and Irene, and Bill and Rita. The author deftly interrogates each character, exploring their hopes and fears, and uncovering the fractures in their relationships that threaten to split wide open. Set in a remote part of the West Country, there’s a real feeling of isolation not just physical but also emotional.

Bill is the epitome of a good man struggling against the odds. His father wanted him to join the family business but Bill’s determined to strike out on his own and make a success of his dairy farm. But it’s hard work involving long hours out of the house and every day seems to throw up a new problem, such as a recalcitrant bull. Bill starts to realise that doing things the way they’ve always been done is not going to work; he needs to think differently, to take a leap of faith in himself.

It’s no wonder that Bill’s wife Rita, already in a fragile mental state, is struggling with the hours she spends alone in their draughty farmhouse and the drudgery of the chores that need doing. And her fears about her pregnancy are becoming overwhelming. It’s all very different from her former untamed lifestyle even if that has come with consequences. I thought Rita the most deftly drawn character in the book. There’s a real sense of constrained wildness about her you feel will be released at some point.

Irene, the wife of Eric the local doctor, is also concerned at the prospect of motherhood, although for different reasons. Despite Irene’s efforts to make a comfortable home her marriage to Eric has become stale. Sometimes she wonders how much she really knows him, or he her. She and Rita find themselves thrown together because of the proximity of their two houses and gradually they form a bond through visits to the local cinema and the sharing of Rolos.

Eric has his own problems but they are entirely of his own making and I found him a largely unsympathetic figure. Having said that, there are glimpses of the compassionate man he might have been.

The author is particularly good at the minituae of domestic life. There’s humour in the book, notably the Boxing Day party Eric and Irene host for their neighbours which could give Mike Leigh’s play ‘Abigail’s Party’ a run for its money when it comes to social pretension and awkward moments. Cheese sticks and Acker Bilk on the record player anyone?

As the weather turns colder and the feeling of isolation intensifies so does the sense of foreboding. A crisis is coming and for many it will be life-changing.

The legacy of war is an element in both the previous books I’ve read by Andrew Miller. In Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, Captain John Lacroix is haunted by an atrocity he witnessed during the Napoleonic War, whilst in The Slowworm’s Song a man dreads his daughter learning about an incident when he was a young soldier in Northern Ireland. The Land in Winter has links to war too, in this case the Second World War. For instance the now disused Anderson shelter in the garden of Bill’s family home has become a place of retreat for Bill’s father. And the psychological impact of things that once seen firsthand can never be unseen becomes apparent in the final chapters.

Although things do happen, some of them quite dramatic, The Land in Winter is essentially a beautifully crafted, character-led novel.

I received an advance read copy courtesy of Sceptre via NetGalley.

In three words: Insightful, intense, poignant
Try something similar: Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

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About the Author

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 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free and The Slowworm’s Song.

Andrew Miller’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset. (Photo: Goodreads author page)