2025 Booker Shortlist: Andrew Miller for The Land in Winter

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025

WINNER OF THE 2025 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION

WINNER OF THE WINSTON GRAHAM HISTORICAL PRIZE 2025

Join us this November as we welcome the ever-brilliant Andrew Miller to celebrate his Booker-shortlisted novel, The Land In Winter.

December 1962, the West Country. In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering.

There is affection - if not always love - in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards - a true winter, the harshest in living memory - the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can't leave home?And where, in a frozen world, could you run to?

Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like A Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, which was the winner of the Highland Book Prize, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, a Waterstones Book of the Month, and a Book of the Year pick in the New Statesman, Guardian and Spectator, and his most recent novel, The Slowworm’s Song.

Andrew Miller's novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.