The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026--San Antonio

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named as a top book of 2025 in many places.  It is a well written book.  It's a little slow at the beginning.  (I only read about 5% of the novel the first day, and I had to go back and re-read it again the next day to remember what was there and to apply that knowledge to what I was reading beyond there.)  But there comes a big turn of events just after all the characters introduced in the book have attended a boxing day party (Dec. 26, 1962).  Within a few days a snow storm has started and is not letting up.  It became known as the Big Freeze of 1963.  The first half of the book had set up the characters in a way that you know that many of them have made decisions in life that are questionable and others have suffered because of events in their lives that they had no control over themselves.  Most of the characters are not that appealing.   In the second half of the book, there is a snowball effect in which the consequences of the poor decisions and the actions of the characters spiral downward and the reader wonders what is going to go wrong and how bad will it get.  Well, there is no happy ending (and the author adds one sentence about 3/4 of the way through that lets you know in advance that this will be the result).  But it is an exciting ride which, combined with the very good writing, caused me to rate the book 4 stars out of 5.