THE LAND IN WINTER

Neighboring couples in the rural West Country weather the famously frigid British winter of 1962.

Miller's 10th novel opens in an asylum near Bristol, England, where one patient awakens in the night to find that another—a boy of 19—has died by suicide. Though we will later learn how these characters connect to the main plot, the focus then shifts to a pair of marriages. One couple, Bill and Rita Simmons, lives on a dairy farm. Bill is new to farming and Rita not long ago worked as a dancer in a club; now she’s pregnant, reading paperbacks and half-heartedly attempting to cook. It is she who will one day, out of boredom, cross the field that separates the Simmonses from their wealthier neighbors, the Parrys: the local physician, Dr. Eric Parry (he prescribed the pills the dead boy took) and his wife, Irene. Though her background is much fancier than Rita’s, Irene is also newly pregnant and the two easily form a friendship. One of the high points of the book, showing off Miller’s dazzling prose and very dry wit, is the drinks party Irene throws on Boxing Day. This party is complicated for Eric by the attendance of his mistress, along with her husband and son, but they will avoid trouble, at least for now. Very much in the air of the novel are World War II and the Holocaust, which the characters lived through in different ways not so long ago. Eric’s medical partner, Gabby Miklos, barely escaped the camps, and tries to share his story with Bill Simmons at the drinks party. “When Gabby began again—Häftling, Sonderkommando, Judenlager—Bill, staring at an abandoned cheese stick on the tablecloth, began to withdraw his heart.” In the same room, to the delight of the other guests, Rita is demonstrating a dance called the mashed potato. Miller is an expert juggler of dark and light, of big and small, of seen and unseen.

A masterful, acute, and very British novel, revealing the tensions of a time beset by winds of change.