Andrew Miller with Helen Taylor: The Land in Winter

The winter of 1962–63 was one of the harshest Britain had experienced for centuries, but in Booker Prize short-listed Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, the Big Freeze becomes much more than a dramatic backdrop. Through the lives of two young couples in a rural West Country community, Miller captures a society still shaped by the Second World War, traditional class divisions and rigid expectations of marriage and family, yet already on the brink of profound change.

This is social history brought vividly to life, a Britain where old certainties are beginning to crumble, but where the freedoms and possibilities of the 1960s have not yet arrived. Miller’s finely observed characters reveal the tensions beneath apparently ordinary lives, from changing attitudes to class and gender to the lingering shadows of war and mental illness.