Set during the Big Freeze of 1962-3, this story of two marriages brilliantly evokes the legacy of the second world war

Andrew Miller is a master of nuance, expert at exploring the various chambers of the human heart. In his Impac-winning debut, 1997’s Ingenious Pain, the protagonist is a doctor incapable of sensation, while in the Booker-shortlisted Oxygen, a Hungarian exile is plagued by a mistake in his past. In The Crossing, scientist and sailor Maud Stamp chooses the loneliness of the ocean over the trappings of convention; while the demands of a vocation take on more visceral form in the Costa-winning Pure, in which engineer Jean-Baptiste Baratte is charged with clearing an overfilled Parisian graveyard just before the Revolution. Now, in The Land in Winter, Miller turns to the difficulty of loving in an unlovely world.

The book opens with a tragedy: a young man’s suicide at night, in the basement of an asylum, his body discovered by an older man who is woken by his absence from the ward. Both are inpatients, and neither – it turns out – is a protagonist in the novel at hand. We will return to them, but only in so far as their fates cross over with the primary characters we are about to meet. Their actions in this first chapter, however – their presence in the hospital and their deep unease with all that lies beyond – underpin everything to come.