The Land in Winter

The Land in Winter is a 2024 novel by English novelist Andrew Miller published by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton. The novel tells the story of two young married couples living in the British West Country during the Big Freeze of 1963 – one of the coldest winters on record in the United Kingdom – with the narrative spanning December 1962 to February 1963.

The novel won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The judges said the novel "painted big themes on a subtle canvas of tiny detail" and described its prose as being "as softly dazzling as the snow of the 1962/63 winter in which the novel is set". The 1962–3 setting fell just within the Prize's definition of "historical" as being at least sixty years earlier. Miller had been shortlisted for the Prize twice before.

The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, with the judges describing it a "dazzling chronicle of the human heart".

Miller described the process of writing the novel as liberating, because "I didn’t worry much about themes. As long as there was a good forward energy, I was happy just to follow it. One of my guiding intentions – a central one – was to let my four main characters have the freedom to see out their parts in whatever way was right for them. No one was going to be shoved around by plot."