Andrew Miller (Andrew Miller | Award-winning writer) has published ten novels and has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa Book Award of the Year, the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize.
Miller’s most recent novel is ‘The Land In Winter‘, and would be a great start to your reading programme in 2026. The summary is as follows: It’s December 1962 in the West Country, England. Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, 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 where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that’s already faltering. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.
The book opens in an asylum where an inmate finds the body of a fellow patient while wandering at night. The reader then follows Dr Parry on his daily rounds, allowing the author to introduce secondary characters and providing a feel for the setting. The following chapters offer versions of events from alternating viewpoints, the timeline gradually moving forward from December to February.
Despite their apparent differences, the two women (both pregnant) strike an easy friendship – a connection that comes as a respite from the surprising tediousness of married life, with its unfulfilled expectations, growing resentments and the ghosts of a recent past. All these suppressed troubles are forced into the open by the increasingly cruel grip of winter.
Check if ‘The Land In Winter‘ by Andrew Miller is in stock at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
384 pages in Sceptre
First published 2024
ISBN-13 : 978-1529354270
Andrew Miller