The Land in Winter

Andrew Miller sets two neighboring marriages against the brutal English winter of 1962–63, a GP having an affair with a patient and his unhappy transplanted wife, an inexperienced farmer and his wife adjusting to rural life, and lets a blizzard that traps the whole community together force every private tension into the open at once. The postwar period and the Holocaust are never far from the book's edges, but Miller's restraint is the point — he mentions both only sparingly, letting their weight register through what's unsaid. Despite the bleak setting, reviewers have noted this isn't a bleak book: the characters are drawn with enough sympathy that readers end up hoping for them rather than simply observing their unraveling. The one dissent, more pacing complaint than structural critique, is that the accumulation of descriptive atmosphere occasionally slows the novel closer to a standstill than its tension can sustain.