Never underestimate the drama in seemingly ordinary lives. That's a lesson English novelist Andrew Miller (The Crossing; The Slowworm's Song) reinforces to brilliant effect in The Land in Winter, finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize and a work that, like the legendary U.K. winter of 1962-63 that is the novel's setting, starts quietly but gathers immense power as it proceeds. In a West Country asylum, a 19-year-old patient, "the baby of the ward," dies from an overdose. Readers eventually discover the connection between the patient who finds him and one of the married couples who dominate the narrative: Eric and Irene Parry, an adulterous doctor and his pregnant, London-transplant wife; and Bill and Rita Simmons, a would-be farmer whose immigrant father got rich as a vile slumlord, and his wife, also pregnant, who used to dance at a club called the Pow-Wow and isn't thrilled about her new life among chickens and dairy bulls.
One might not expect this premise to yield smoldering drama, but Miller expertly unearths many layers of raw emotion. There's little plot here, but Miller delves deep in a way that's rare for contemporary fiction. That may seem like a nice way of saying that this is old-fashioned storytelling, but it's the good kind of old-fashioned, patient and thoughtful and generous rather than antiquated. The second half of the novel includes a magnificent extended sequence with multiple characters on multiple trains, shifting among their perspectives as the snow falls and, in some cases, makes travel dangerous. Fans of the literary slow build will be dazzled. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer