? Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025

? Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025

A best book of the year for the Independent, Guardian, i Newspaper and Good Housekeeping.

'Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect. A novel that touches your cells and can be felt there, without your brain really knowing what has happened to it. Superb.' SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital

'Delicate and devastating' INDEPENDENT, The 20 best books of the year

'Miller may have written his best book yet... brilliance that is not to be missed' GUARDIAN, The best fiction of 2024

'Incredibly satisfying' FINANCIAL TIMES

'A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose' MAIL ON SUNDAY

DECEMBER 1962, THE WEST COUNTRY. In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, pondering secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering.

There is affection - if not always love - in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards - a true winter, the harshest in living memory - the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can't leave home?

Author: ANDREW MILLER

Language: ENGLISH

Pages: 384

Year of publication: 2025