Set in Devon in the great winter of 1962-3, when many villages were cut off from the world by blizzards and snow-drifts, when trains were forced to abandon journeys, when the sea off the Kent coast had pack ice and some of the upper reaches of the Thames froze, this is a historical novel. It focuses principally on four characters: Eric, a GP who is having an affair with one of his patients, and his pregnant wife Irene, and Bill, a novice dairy farmer and his pregnant wife Rita, a former show girl in a nightclub who has a passion for science fiction and hears voices in her head. The story is told, in the past tense (with the occasional flash forward into the future), from the perspective of each of these characters.
As someone who remembers that winter, I am not sure that historical fiction ought to be set within living memory. It made for an interesting experience. I remember the milkman bring the milk on a sledge!
It starts from the PoV of another person, a patient in the local asylum, who finds the dead body of another patient, who suicide has been facilitated by the unusually large quantity of drugs prescribed by Dr Eric. It ends with total weirdness: a descent into madness or a strange occurrence which might have been foreshadowed by the following lines: “At the edge of the field, by the shadow-line of the hedge, a dog, or something like a dog, raised its head into the light, studied them a moment, the two women upright in the field, then dropped out of sight again, soundlessly.” (Part Two: Saturday, 5th January)
In fact many of the characters' thoughts hover on the cusp of the bizarre:
- “The time? He sifted it from the air, from the many small clues it gave.” (1.1)
- “Time would level it out, for that, he had learned (quite recently), was what time did.” (1.2)
- “This was something else she had learned, that drop into the fever of not knowing, except it’s not confusion exactly, more a case of one part of you not yet ready to accept what the other part knowns perfectly well.” (1.3)
- “She imagined the bull in his pen, the night moving like a river through the big sack of his head. The world, the fog world in its brittle glass sheath of now, was aching for an arrival. Stare long enough, hard enough, and it might be happening already.” (1.10)
- “Each secret meeting tied another thread and tautened the ones already there.” (14th December 1962; 1)
- “He thought of the expression ‘to collect oneself’, of what it meant and how it might be done.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
- “My mind, thought Bill, is like a fly in a matchbox.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
- “The dexamyl was starting to work, the first threads. For a few hours the voices would lie on their backs, frozen, beaks wide but silent.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
- “The other's body, with its lumps and strappings, its terrible softness, was an animal you meet in a dream and must placate with songs and silences; a wicked witch who turns out to be a middle aged woman with poor circulation and some unsheddable grief you are free to look away from.” (Part Two:Saturday 12th January)
I suspect that the theme of families being isolated by the world is a metaphor for the lockdown imposed by the Covid pandemic, which must have been around the time that Miller was writing the novel.
It is one of those novels that take a long time to get going. We are half way through before the snow descends. But this means that it can establish its characters thoroughly in their complexity and with all their background. These feel like real people! And that in turn means that when they think strange thoughts, the reader accepts them. In the second half of the novel, things, even violent things, happen and again, because the build-up had been so painstaking, they do not seem forced or jolt the reader from the suspension of disbelief. Even the final chapter can be credited, although different readers will develop different interpretations.
There are also some deft touches, such as when Eric draws the sheet over his face, mirroring his action when his father died ... in the same bed. Beautiful mirroring! This care with the brush strokes suggest an author at his most skilled.
In 2025, the novel won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
Selected quotes:
- “The wireless, lost between stations, hissed like escaping gas then suddenly spoke, posing a question in a language he did not know.” (1.1)
- “In retrospect he seemed, like most of the other masters, a man in despair, who gave expression to it - got some relief from it - by being violent towards children.” (1.4)
- “His wellingtons ... were spotless, and one imagined them to have their own faint pattern of pinstripe.” (1.8)
- “It was a child's bed - she was too big for it, an imposter, an alien.” (Part Two: Thursday 10th January)
August 2026; 371 pages
First published by Sceptre in 2024
My paperback edition was issued in 2025
Andrew Miller has written a number of novels including Pure, also historical fiction, which I reviewed in 2012.
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