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On Boxing Day 1962, snow began to fall across Britain. A few days later, the New Year was announced in blizzard conditions, after which the snow remained on the ground for 60 days. Drifts reached heights of up to 20 feet, power lines collapsed, pipes froze, roads and railways were blocked. Rural communities were isolated, forcing helicopters to make emergency food drops for humans and livestock. This record winter – the longest and coldest in over 200 years – became known as the Big Freeze.

Andrew Miller, whose fiction won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Costa Book of the Year and a place on the Booker Prize shortlist, recounts the action of his 10th novel, Earth in Winter, during this famous cold season. The book opens in early December 1962 and ends two months later, in February 1963.

The surprising harshness of the weather reflects the fragile relationships between two married couples in a small West Country village. Neither are quite married, but both relationships are budding enough that they haven’t yet descended into monotony. Eric Parry is one of two GPs serving the area. He is busy with his work and the affair he is having with one of his married patients. Left to her own devices in their cabin all day, his wife Irene forms a tentative friendship with her closest neighbor, Rita Simmons, whose husband Bill is new to the grueling life of the dairy farm. The otherwise somewhat unlikely bond between the two women is strengthened by the fact that they have both just become pregnant.

This is a quiet book about quiet lives, but Miller’s delicate attention to the inner lives of his characters makes it an incredibly satisfying read.

Although these characters have many reasons to look to the future with enthusiasm and optimism, memories of their past (both personal and collective) prove difficult to forget. More broadly, of course, Britain itself is at the dawn of the Swinging Sixties, the decade that brought notable societal and cultural transformations – whether the end of capital punishment, legalization of homosexuality or the second wave of feminism. Yet, as Miller carefully shows us, World War II didn’t happen that long ago, and for some, its worst horrors prove impossible to forget.

In Juliet Nicolson’s recent work on cultural history, Icequake (2021), she argued that the Great Freeze marked a turning point in the country, with the eventual thaw in March leading to a defrosting of rigid attitudes toward class, gender, and politics. It’s a nice metaphor, but unfortunately, it wasn’t as clear, with these changes spanning several decades.

Where the cultural historian does not really convince, the novelist intervenes. Although the canvas of this novel is relatively small – these two couples cannot be expected to speak for every man or woman their age – The earth in winter manages to capture something of this era of social upheaval. It is characterized here by the varying degrees of uncertainty that the protagonists feel as they struggle to cope with the choices they have made and the possible futures that await them. “Freedom,” Irene thinks, when at the end of the novel she finds herself forced to take refuge under a stranger’s roof, “would be without comfort. It would be like this room. It wouldn’t be like home, or like any house she knows.

It’s a quiet book about quiet lives; internal troubles prevail over external dramas. But Miller’s delicate attention to the inner lives of his characters makes for incredibly satisfying reading. His elegant and measured prose is also remarkable. Take his tense descriptions of the winter landscape, across which the snow stretches “in subtle ripples, each with its deepening blue shadow.” The cold descended and the earth tightened”; or Bill’s observation of a snowy sky as “the color of sheep’s wool”; or the description of a blind child “swimming” across a room, arms outstretched, groping to move forward. At the heart of the novel is a brilliant, sustained setting depicting the increasingly drunken party that Eric and Irene throw the day after Christmas; a loud and hoarse hurray, after which the thick falling snow brings a heavy and soft silence.

There is often something deeply inscrutable about Miller’s characters. On occasion, I found it boring – for me, his otherwise haunting novel THE Passage was marred by the impenetrable enigma of its protagonist – but here, the elements of its protagonists’ inner lives or relationships with each other that resist easy access feel intimately attuned to their surroundings, both atmospheric and environmental. We can sink into this novel as we sink into freshly rolled powder snow.

The earth in winter by Andrew Miller Scepter 384 pages, £20

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