It’s a privilege to even be nominated for the Booker Prize, so it’s no small feat that Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter (Scepter, 2024) was a finalist for the award in 2025. The novel is lauded for its understated subtlety, rich storytelling, and strong writing. 

 

I’m here to tell you that’s nonsense.

 

The novel takes place in an English village during the 1962-1963 Big Freeze, one of the UK’s coldest winters on record. The story revolves around two married couples, told from the perspectives of all four characters. Given the harsh winter setting and varied points of view, the stage is set for a strong, character-driven narrative. The main characters are:

 

Eric Parry: A doctor who stays busy at work and spends his spare time having an affair. 

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Irene Parry: Eric’s wife, who left a well-off family to make a new life with Eric. She feels out of place in the village.

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Bill Simmons: A struggling farmer who shunned his affluent father’s business in pursuit of his own path.

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Rita Simmons: A former nightclub dancer who, like Irene, also feels out of place in the village.

 

Think they sound hollow? It’s exactly the level of depth that Miller gives us. The thorough deflation you’ve experienced from my descriptions is exactly how Miller leaves you after immersing yourself in the characters’ world for 368 pages.  

 

To his credit, Miller’s depiction of setting is spot on. He paints us a perfect picture of conditions under The Big Freeze and describes every little detail of the protagonists’ houses. But that’s about the best we get out of his writing. He had the backdrop of one of UK history’s most ferocious blizzards and did absolutely nothing with it. 

 

Eric is a shell of a character. He has little feeling about the affair, worrying instead about how his mistress’s husband will react. In fact, worrying is a gross overstatement of his emotions. He says rather than feels his thoughts on the page, and acts simply to keep the story moving. He exists purely as a plot device for Irene’s character arc, which would be fine if he didn’t have his own dedicated chapters. I felt no burning desire to root for nor against Eric Parry. His reasons for infidelity are shoddy at best, and his atonement consists of taking his wife on an outing–a trite gesture that any unfaithful husband might attempt. 

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The same shallowness plagues the plot, which is largely absent in the novel. What little plot exists is predictable. Of course Irene finds out about Eric’s infidelity, it’s only a matter of how? The answer: a love letter in the breast pocket of his jacket. This is the perfect climactic moment to delve into what infidelity does to married couples. But Miller hardly lets us into Irene’s mind. She expresses standard anger and disgust, opting to go away for a while. Beyond that? Nothing. We later get a whiff of Irene’s decision to suppress her fury in favor of subdued sadness, though the rationale is hardly explained. I would’ve liked more specific motivators for Irene Parry instead of reading about how any victim of cheating would react. Instead, I got a character arc that ultimately falls short.

 

The Simmons side of the story is no better. Bill tries everything to jump start his ailing farm, but ends up asking his wealthy, estranged father for money. Again, it’s predictable. Bill’s vehemence to distance himself from his wealth contrasted with his struggling business can only lead back to his father. And, as you guessed, his father gives him the money. We’re left with vacuous descriptions of Bill’s feelings instead of concrete motivation for shoving aside his pride. Was it purely for survival? Did he have qualms about taking the briefcase full of cash? Miller leaves us on the edge, but more out of confusion than cliffhanger.

 

As for Rita, all we hear about are her hallucinations, the “voices in her head.” Miller again has the opportunity to do so much with this amongst the backdrop of the freezing cold, and again fails to make something of it. There’s no suspense that accompanies the voices, no attempt to either tie up the loose end or emphasize their everlasting ambiguity. Rita gets a symbolic ending, but it’s too little, too late for me. The absence of that energy throughout the novel leaves readers wondering where it’s been instead moved at its significance.  

 

Perhaps that’s the point of the novel–to understand the characters through mundane descriptions. But it’s a highly underwhelming sensory experience. When reading a character-driven work, I’m looking to feel the breadth of emotions that characters experience. By depriving readers of these emotions, Miller takes away the novel’s primary source of enjoyment.

 

I kept turning the pages, hoping that something of substance would happen. Instead, I was left with an absolute dud. The entire novel is subtle, but it’s too subtle for me. No salient themes stick out, the characters don’t experience profound moments of reckoning, and there is little to tie their four stories together. You could argue that the point was to highlight how only those within the relationship know what’s really going on, but that point is better made by honing in on one couple and their public versus private dynamic.

 

The only people to whom I would recommend The Land In Winter are those who enjoy setting-driven fiction or those who enjoy descriptions of trivial minutiae. Otherwise, move along to something else on the shelf.