

The Land in Winter
Andrew Miller
i'm not quite hooked on this book yet... 🥲
this book was also short-listed for the 2025 booker prize, alongside eventual winner flesh.
having read flesh (and very much enjoyed it), i can't help to think back to commentary at the time of david szalay's win, and seeing many comments that the land in winter was the clear winner...but flesh had me hooked from the beginning, not just bc of the plot, but also the writing style.
definitely not going to dnf, but this is a bit flat atm.
I don't know if I missed something, but I was just waiting for this book to make sense. In the way that I didn't understand what the intention was.
And maybe part of it is on me, because from the synopsis I thought these people were going to be snowed in together and confronting some hard truths. Instead, it was just a slow, meandering story and of course, their lives "started to unravel" (as per the synopsis), I felt like it didn't happen in any impactful way.
I normally enjoy slow books, but they need to have some intention behind them or something needs to be significant. The book deals with heavy themes, but it feels like it's all a bit obscured from view and I would love to get underneath the surface a bit more. Maybe I was just expecting a bigger emotional impact.
But still I just felt like this book didn't tackle anything new in a significant way, so it just kind of felt like I wasted my time, even though I genuinly enjoyed the reading experience. The prose was also really good, and I did get an emotional connection to most of the main characters (ifykyk).
I think this book would be a good fit for someone looking for more of a "cosy" book that deals with heavier themes. That is not to say that I think this book is cosy, but rather that it reminds me a bit of books that are labeled "cosy" in the narrative pace and structure.
idaquaries commented...
10w
yes, i feel like this is going to take a while to get into😭 i've enjoyed a lot of books that have been shortlisted previously, so i'm definitely going to give it a fair chance but at the moment there are just so many descriptions that the plot is moving so slowlyy