Andrew Miller - The Land in Winter (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025) ****

Two neighbouring couples - a young family doctor and his wife, and a young new farmer and his wife - live through a long winter in a village somewhere in England. Interestingly, the two women - Irene and Rita - have no real activity and begin a friendship, and both happen to be pregnant. Eric, the doctor, has a mistress, and Bill, the farmer, has ambitious plans for a much bigger farm, even if he can't even run the small farm he has today. 

Miller describes, develops these lives of very normal people in all their nuance and complexity of interaction without judgment or stereotyping. His prose is absolutely exquisite, well-balanced in terms of plot development and equal attention to the four protagonists and their personal issues and struggles with each other and the many other characters. The timing is right after World War II, still present as the background for people to recover, to think about building new lives, a new world after the horrors. 

Miller is not a very adventurous from an artistic perspective: his approach fits within the boundaries of established literature, controlled, well-crafted, with genuine feeling for his characters, and of a superb quality.