Andrew Miller’s moving new novel is set in the ‘Big Freeze’ of 1962–3, Britain’s coldest winter since 1739. From December through to February, there was no let-up. Snowdrifts formed walls that were metres high; rivers and lakes froze; transport ground to a halt. Milk bottles froze on the doorsteps of ordinary homes, which were themselves often heated by a single coal fire or the feeble bar of an electric fire. The world shrank in on itself.

The English novelist Andrew Miller has long exulted in the bitter beauty of extreme winter. In his prize-winning debut, Ingenious Pain (1997), the novel’s hero is conceived on ice by skaters during the great frost of 1739–40. Ingenious Pain, like his more recent historical novels Pure (2011) and Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (2018), treats the past as a site of macabre, exuberant and subversive invention. The Land in Winter is quieter and more reflective, but it still offers a full display of Miller’s gifts. 

‘We are born too late and too early,’ says the pathologist in Ingenious Pain, ‘between the secret arts of the old world and the discoveries of the age to come.’ The Land in Winter situates its characters in a trough between the Second World War and the Sixties in