The Land in Winter

Miller (The Slowworm’s Song) offers a stunning portrait of domestic turmoil and post-WWII unease. The story opens in 1962, when London transplant Irene Parry, the dissatisfied wife of country doctor Eric, befriends her neighbor Rita Simmons. Rita is married to Bill, who is attempting to distance himself from his father, a Polish immigrant turned London slumlord whose shady dealings made the family wealthy. As the year progresses, Miller lays out the dilemmas both couples are facing, including Eric’s guilt over a patient’s death and his affair with a local woman, Bill’s need for money to expand his farm and unwillingness to ask his father for a loan, and the two women’s unexpected pregnancies. When a blizzard hits the region in the new year, the novel’s pacing shifts from languid to rapid-fire, as Irene discovers a note from Eric’s lover and tries to leave for London but gets stuck in the snow. Meanwhile, Bill is away, having finally gone to London to beg his father for money, and Rita, whose own father was committed to an asylum, has a mental breakdown while alone in the house. A spectacularly vivid sense of gloom pervades the narrative, whether in recurring references to the obliterating London smog, Rita’s unsettling memories of her father’s stories about liberating Auschwitz, or Bill’s reflections on his war-profiteering father. Even keener are the author’s crystalline depictions of his characters’ interior lives. This has the feel of an instant classic. (Nov.)