Andrew Miller in conversation with Juliet Nicolson

The Land in Winter

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025
Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025
Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025
A book of the year for the Independent, Guardian, i Newspaper, Good Housekeeping

Andrew Miller is the author of ten novels. Born in Bristol in 1960, he studied at Middlesex Polytechnic, the University of East Anglia (with Malcolm Bradbury, Rose Tremain and Lorna Sage) and at Lancaster University, where he completed his PhD under the supervision of Professor David Craig. He has been awarded The James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Grinzane Cavour, the International IMPAC, the Costa Book of the Year and the Highland Prize. His novels have also been shortlisted for the Booker and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

About The Land in Winter

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, can you run to?

Praise for The Land in Winter

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 – The best fiction of 2024

Guardian

A delicate and devastating novel . . . The novel captures in beautiful, thought-provoking style a vivid moment in England’s past – The 20 best books of the year

Independent

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

About Juliet Nicolson

Juliet Nicolson is the bestselling author of three works of social history, The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War; The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911; and Frostquake: The frozen winter of 1962 and how Britain emerged a different country; as well as a family memoir, A House Full of Daughters. She is a mother and a grandmother and lives with her husband in East Sussex.

Juliet is talking about her new book The Book of Revelations on the same evening.