Booker Prize 2025: ‘The Land in Winter’ presents a novel idea but struggles to engage the reader

I was most excited about reading Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter from the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist. It seemed like just the book I was yet to read in my life – an atmospheric historical novel about how a major climate event affected individual lives.

At the end of 400 pages, I’m not sure how I feel.

There is beauty and commitment, grandeur and skill, and yet…

The coldest winter

Set in the ghastly English winters of 1962–63, the novel harks back to a time which is still living memory. It is perhaps not entirely correct to call the novel “historical” fiction but it is likely that the exceptional phenomenon has assumed legendary proportions in the English memory – this makes for solid ground for fiction. During such events, facts and memories coalesce into stories that are as much testament to history as they are of myth-making and epic fables of survival.

The 60s of Miller’s novel is nothing like the 60s of popular imagination – there is no Beatles here; this is a society still grappling with the monumental effects of the wars, always on the verge of poverty and hunger. There is something almost prehistoric about this England – electricity is scarce, the countryside feels hostile, and the agrarian economy is still...

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