The Land in Winter

A beautifully written, slow-burn portrait of a moment and place in time, it excavates the intricacies of the human heart

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

The Land in Winter is a wondrous novel about the interior lives of the occupants of two marriages, set in the intensely realised physical world they inhabit. Andrew Miller's talent is to allow us into their world - into their houses and into their minds - so that we see them both as young marrieds in an English village in the coldest winter of the twentieth century and as souls passing through the snowstorms of time

With each new novel, Andrew Miller revitalises the form and takes the reader to extraordinary new places. His work is truly exploratory, never still in its ambition or human dynamics. There's always immense sensuality, disquiet, drama and wisdom in his books, but The Land in Winter is outstandingly beautiful and immersive in its storytelling. It's disruptive and graceful beyond anything I've read or could hope to write. He is the novelists' lodestar

Sentence after sentence, The Land in Winter is beautifully intricate, deeply moving, and utterly absorbing

Delicate and devastating . . . a brilliant novel, but wrap your emotions up tight because Miller steers it expertly towards a desolate, distressing ending

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

A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose

Beautifully done

Miller works magic, bringing to life not just human relations, but the Sixties too, before they began to swing

Moving . . . offers a full display of Miller's gifts . . . In the white violence of the winter terrain, the narrator's voice wreaths around everything. That voice is the glory of The Land in Winter

Psychologically acute . . . For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives . . . gripping

Miller is on superb form here as he portrays the everyday lives of country doctor Eric and farmer Bill and their respective wives, Irene and Rita, both of whom are expecting their first child. This is a story of conformity and conflict - against the elements, societal changes and the characters' sense of themselves. That inner turmoil is brilliantly crafted, and the depiction of the local asylum in particular is chilling in every sense

This story of two marriages brilliantly evokes the legacy of the second world war. Andrew Miller is a master of nuance, expert at exploring the various chambers of the human heart . . . For all its wintry setting and cold echoes of the past, and for all that it opens with a death in an asylum, this is not a bleak book. The people in it yearn and reach; they make mistakes, too - some of them terrible. But all the while, somehow, you feel - you hope - they might find a way through . . . In The Land in Winter, Miller's characters have looked into the abyss. It makes the ordinary business of living at once very difficult and very necessary

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

Deeply evocative . . . a memorable slice of historical fiction

The writing is stunning and the details of the 1960s setting are particularly evocative. Another psychologically rich novel from one of my favourite writers

Finally, a recent publication that deserves the widest attention. Andrew Miller is known for acute and unnerving historical novels such as Pure and Ingenious Pain, but in The Land in Winter, a study of two young marriages during England's 1962-3 Big Freeze, he may have written his best book yet. The shadows of madness, and of the second world war, extend into a world on the cusp of enormous social change. Miller conjures his characters and their times with a subtle brilliance that is not to be missed

A delicate and devastating novel . . . The novel captures in beautiful, thought-provoking style a vivid moment in England's past

Expertly layered and so acutely rendered it makes you shiver, this is a breathtaking book from one of our most underrated novelists

Perfect

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

I loved The Land in Winter. I am in awe of the understanding, the grace and eloquence of it. I kept smiling to myself as I read with a kind of wonder at the sheer perception. The insideness he seemed able to find and the idea that at some point, even the most conflicted ideas touch one another. There were moments I thought of Penelope Fitzgerald - that moment I have always loved in The Beginning of Spring when the birch trees seem to grow hands - those liminal moments that are kind of beyond words, or explanation, but he finds them anyway. It's a thing of rare beauty

[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.

Miller's tale of two young couples in the West Country who get snowed in during the big freeze of 1962-63 has an uncanny beauty and depth [...] a novel that travels into the darkest places of history and the strangest corners of the human mind.

Set during the freezing winter of 1962, this psychologically interior novel from a master of the form centres on two married couples. . . who are forced to re-examine their lives when a blizzard cuts off their homes from the outside world.

[T]ravels deep into the hearts of its characters, two young married couples in the West Country. This novel has had my heart since it was published last November. . . it's the best book yet from a stellar writer

This chilly, brilliant novel is Miller at his best.

Profound and moving and exquisitely written . . . A classic in the making

This has the feel of an instant classic.

It's the literary duel of the autumn. This year's six-strong Booker Prize shortlist, announced on Tuesday at London's Southbank Centre, is one of the most consistently brilliant in years - but two writers still emerge neck-and-neck above the others: Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai...[The Land in Winter is] a beautifully atmospheric snapshot of two marriages during Britain's "Big Freeze" of 1962, and further proof that he's one of the best writers at work on these islands today... Told across four wholly different perspectives, it's ostensibly about an unconventional friendship between Rita, a farmer's wife, and Irene, a doctor's - neighbours who bond over their pregnancies and absent husbands. But it's more broadly about a 1960s that isn't yet swinging, stuck, instead, between delicate to-and-fros over gender and class. The Second World War is hardly mentioned, but you feel its aftermath, its grip. As with good historical fiction, you always know where you are, without being explicitly told. Go and buy The Land in Winter, read it for yourself. Desai's novel will win many hearts, but Miller's should win the Booker Prize.

Atmospheric...His elegant, old-fashioned storytelling really conjures up postwar England. It feels like a cross between the works of Shena Mackay and Penelope Fitzgerald - in the most satisfying ways.

Social faultlines are everywhere in Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter, set in the West Country during the punishing winter of 1962. Miller moves hypnotically between the surface of things - the work of a rural GP, of an inexperienced dairy farmer, of a woman discovering the demands and empty stretches of housewifery - and the deep currents of their desires. The two couples at the centre of the novel are as frozen as the landscape in which Miller places them, but huge changes are coming for them all - and the country in which they live.