[I am reading this 2024 novel in sections, writing about each section before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the novel as I read it.]
5 November 2025
Part 1—7th December 1962, Chapters 1-10
A day in the life of two young married couples, neighbours just outside a small village near Bristol. It’s a typically cold English December, but these aren’t typical locals. They’re all outsiders of one kind or another—none of them is familiar with country life, having moved there in the last year or so. And the weather isn’t going to remain typical for very much longer. These innocents are going to be faced with the notorious ‘Big Freeze’ that lasted from late December to the beginning of March, and we already wonder how on earth they are going to cope.
Each chapter, conventionally enough, gives us the point of view of one character, for a section of the day—the morning in Chapters 2-5, the afternoon and evening in 6-10. (Sometimes there’s a rewind at the start of a chapter, which can feel clunky.) Each has a back-story, which comes to us piecemeal through memories, conversations and some authorial telling. And Miller does that thing where he mentions enough details of everyday life in the 1960s to build a convincing world, without it becoming a nostalgic wallow for older readers. Sliced white bread in waxed paper yes, brand names usually not. Does he do it well? Well enough.
Only the first chapter is not from the point of view of one of the four main characters. This is a patient in a mental asylum, awake at night, who discovers the body of a nineteen-year-old suicide victim in the hospital laundry. Save that for later. Then, in chapter order, we are with Eric, the junior doctor in the local general practice and husband of Irene; Rita, wife of Bill, a middle-class chap who has bought a small farm as a kind of challenge; Bill himself, as lacking in expertise and confidence as you would expect a complete rookie farmer to be; and Irene herself. That’s five chapters, and the next five are variations on the same cast-list: Eric; Irene and Rita meeting for the first time; Bill; Irene, dealing with a tense-seeming Eric that evening (tell you why later); Rita and Bill, the same evening.
I’m not sure why Miller has used a similar template for both his couples. Eric is a bright grammar-school lad from Birmingham, not from Irene’s middle-class set at all but perfectly confident in himself. She considers herself to be somebody who works hard—she had done the standard secretarial course before marrying, but no job has been mentioned—and is wondering if the wife of a country doctor is what she wants to be. She was useful to Eric at first, but the practice now has a very competent secretary. Now she is pregnant—we wonder at first why she is so listless—and wondering what comes next. Her sister, married to an American, sends her women’s magazines containing at least one article about the hardships of early motherhood.
Bill is the middle-class one in the other relationship, the son of a self-made Greek immigrant he finds flashy and only interested in money. He had wanted Bill to be a lawyer to help him in his business, but Bill dropped out. It’s not clear how exactly Bill finances the farm, but we know both that he has taken out a big loan (for the whole amount?) and that he is a poor businessman. Rita had been working for the estate agent handling the sale of the farm, and had impressed Bill when she took it upon herself to show him around the property. She had been born on a farm, but knew nothing about how farming actually works. It didn’t stop her pretending she did… and now tiny little cracks are showing in the relationship. Why on earth, he wonders, does she read those awful science fiction books from the mobile library? Why isn’t she just a bit better at being a farmer’s wife? And that part of her past when she was a dancer in a Bristol club is something he never asks about….
The cracks in Eric and Irene’s relationship are also visible. We discover Eric’s infidelity early in Chapter 2, as he is forced to stifle his irritation in the surgery when he receives an intimate love letter from someone who is clearly not Irene. We discover later that he sees Alison regularly, at the end of the day before her husband gets home from his high-salary job with the big tobacco company in Bristol. We meet her for the first time in Chapter 8, after Eric has had to visit the asylum to certify the death of the suicide victim. He is implicated, having prescribed a month’s worth of sleeping pills for the young man. He had seemed perfectly well, was about to be discharged, and Eric had thought there was no danger of suicide. After receiving the news in person from the pompoous asylum administrator, he doesn’t have a great time at Alison’s—and nor does he when he goes home. Alison is on his mind—the chapter had ended with his musings on what on earth love is—but he has to hide that. And he hides the fact that he might be in serious trouble over the suicide.
Irene and Rita, having spoken properly to each other for the first time when Rita brings eggs, discover a mutual understanding they wouldn’t have predicted. Rita is full of life, but definitely not the kind of woman Irene would have had for a friend in the stuffy old world of her parents. And Rita’s friends, what we know of them, had been lively and fun, not like Irene. But Rita is pregnant too, a month behind Irene, and they find themselves talking endlessly. Before Eric comes home, Irene feels herself ready to make love for the first time in months… but we know how that ends. Poor Irene. Poor all of them—it’s becoming pretty clear that the Winter of the title doesn’t only refer to the cold of this particular December. Rita, on the same evening, burns the dinner as usual, and thinks back to the voices she heard while she was at Irene’s. She has never told anybody about the voices that surround her, often, and she isn’t going to start now.
And, reader, the mental patient who discovered the young suicide’s body is… Rita’s father. Miller is making his claustrophobic little world feel more tightly constricted with every chapter, in which perhaps impulsive marriages begin to seem like a trap, and states of mind can be as stifling as everything else. Nobody’s upbringing has prepared them for the new and unwelcome realisation they all seem to be reaching in their different ways—that real life, and real, long-term relationships, are nothing like their expectations. On his rounds and on his visit to Alison, Eric only sees the most limited of possibilities. Bill frets about the next little thing that will happen on the farm—broken gate? stillborn calf?—to cause him anxiety and no doubt make the other farmers laugh behind his back. Rita and Irene…. Is there anything at all in store for them to make them feel any hope? This isn’t love in a cold climate. This is meagre survival in a climate that’s only going to get colder.
14th December 1962, Chapters 1-3, and Boxing Day—to the end of Part 1
Does it? Get colder? Not particularly on 14th December, but just you wait. What it does get is darker in tone and, for whatever reason, death never seems very far away. At the start of Chapter 1 we get the grisly humour of the pathologist jauntily reminding Eric what autopsies involve. We don’t realise at first what he’s talking about: ‘Some prefer to do this in two goes … As the bishop probably didn’t say to the actress.’ In fact, he’s describing a full-body evisceration of the young suicide victim, and finds nothing unexpected. Cause of death was the sleeping pills, but he reassures Eric he has nothing to worry about. It doesn’t really help—during the procedure, he muses about what might be happening outside. ‘In here, in the basement, the outer world might be doing anything. It might be on fire, the four horsemen cantering around College Green, slicing the heads off policemen.’ It’s a joke, kind of, but my God.
Eric drives from the hospital to a pre-planned assignation with Alison. It’s at an open-air spot they had visited in the summer, and it had been idyllic. Now it’s cold, and instead of lying in the warm grass, they have to do what they can. Specifically, Alison does what she can, which is to unzip Eric and give him a blow job. While she’s doing that, he muses about how Irene only ever did that once, and probably only because it’s what was expected of her. But he does wonder how on earth she knew about such a thing…. He had intended, and Alison had expected, that approaching fatherhood would put an end to the affair. But she’s making it difficult. She’s just given him a very nice watch, a Swiss movement in a Rolex case, and he wonders whether he will only want to wear it when he’s with her. ‘Clearly, it was not going to be as simple as he had thought. … It still had to be done, of course. Not because he was tired of her. He wasn’t. … but if he didn’t do it, didn’t tidy things up, it would end in a way he wasn’t in control of, and that frightened him.’
Is every thought in this novel so full of uncertainty? The next chapter rewinds to the start of the day, at the farm. The cows are as familiar with the milking routine as Bill, and it runs smoothly. But here comes Drusilla, the awkward one who sometimes kicks, the one who lost the calf in the previous section. He doesn’t want to use fetters on her: ‘They shuffled like convicts. He didn’t care to see it,’ and we wonder if it’s one to file away for later. Some farmers say the cows don’t notice the fetters—‘they’re not pets’—and he thinks of how Rita made a garland of flowers for her favourite in the summer. There’s a photograph of it wearing the garland, taken with her father’s camera—‘the same camera he had carried in the war, probably the one he had photographed the camp with.’ Ah, the camp. We know from the earlier chapters that photographing a Nazi death camp, and witnessing the mass burning of bodies, had sparked her father’s madness. He had started lighting fires of his own, and it’s his arson attacks that have led to his being in the asylum for years.
Dark thoughts, often just under the surface. Were they there in the first section? Did I just not pick up on them? Whatever, they don’t entirely disappear from Bill’s mind as he visits his bank manager—a slightly less edgy meeting than Eric’s with the pompous hospital administrator in the first section—on his perhaps fanciful scheme to set up a big beef farm on a disused airfield. The bank manager is kind, but his broad hint that without money from his father he won’t get a loan for the rest brings some dark thoughts back. (Rita tells Irene in the next chapter, ‘Bill says his father owns whole streets in London.’ Ah.) And as he’d contemplated the portrait of the bank manager’s predecessor, he wonders where he is now. ‘Was he dead now? Or old somewhere, very old, an untouched cup of tea on the table, his hands mottled and, to his own gaze, strange.’
Bill, for some reason, doesn’t feel deflated after the meeting. But he mistrusts the manager’s sources, wondering where he found out about his father. News clippings? Or the bush telegraph of the banking system, maybe going right to the Bank of England? Interestingly, Eric had wondered about the hospital administrator’s connections too. In his case, he had decided he must be a Mason. He knew from his short time as a GP the kinds of perks and special treatment open to professional men like him. Freebies, dinners, special treatment…. But Bill’s day in town ends when he sees a girl fixing up a shop display for Christmas. Charming? Or another confirmation of how alone we are in the world? ‘She suddenly knew herself watched and turned quickly to look out, saw Bill and grinned. Something forward in that expression, though it might only have been because of the glass between them.’
Meanwhile, Rita and Irene have taken a train ride to Bristol for a matinee at the pictures. What could be negative about that? You’d be surprised. Or not. Irene notices the gaps in the conversation as they wait for the train—maybe they have little to share beyond their pregnant condition. In the train and talking about the sickness Rita is still suffering, she has a very private memory about the last time she reached this point in a pregnancy. Cue two pages of deliberately flat description of her trip to abortionist, in a respectable-looking house somewhere a bus-ride from town. When Irene notices her tears, Rita makes light of it. ‘“Just a funny turn, dear,” said Rita, in a funny voice.’ She does a lot of funny voices in this chapter, and Andrew Miller wants us to notice.
Irene isn’t immune either. As they wait for the newsreel at the start of the show, she thinks of how, at the age of fourteen, she saw footage of the Allies’ liberation of the Belsen camp. It’s haunted her ever since, and she finds herself ‘coiled’ whenever a newsreel is about to start. But… there’s womanly solidarity too. When Rita feels dreadfully sick during the second film, she only just makes it to the Ladies’ in time. After some minutes—fifteen, in fact, which we might think is a lot—Irene goes to offer her support in the cubicle. Irene’s diffidence makes way for something more instinctive. confirming their mutual trust. ‘Irene held her head, [until] there was no more. They leaned against the wall of the cubicle, one behind the other, like riders on a scooter.’
So all’s well? What do you think? We’ve seen headlines about Polaris, a pointless newsreel item about a dog burnt to death—fire again—and, now I think of it, that other memory of fire to join the others. As Irene had thought back to that Belsen footage, she remembered her shock—she had missed one of her periods, which had only recently started—and some dark thoughts that seem to have started young. ‘The guards, women among them, were brutal idiots, but she knew, even at fourteen, that they would be replaced, that it wasn’t an end to murder at all, that it would go on somewhere else, always keeping a little ahead of the cleansing fire.’ Cleansing fire? What, like the one Eric imagines, as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse unleash it on a terrified College Green outside the pathologist’s hospital?
Enough of that strange afternoon. Miller leaves it with Irene in the cinema bar after the show, feeling utterly out of place in Rita’s former world. Rita knows everybody, including the Black projectionist. Her best friend had been Gloria, his sister, but she hasn’t seen her since she moved out of the city. Rita had deflected Irene’s question about why—‘I think she just changed her mind about me’—and we wonder what she’s hiding. She isn’t happy about it—any more than Irene is happy in this strange world of informal friendships. It’s about class, of course. ‘None of the people at the bar were the kind her mother would be pleased to see her in the company of. And they were having a sort of party, in the middle of a Friday afternoon….’ My goodness.
Boxing Day, the final chapter in Part 1, shows how parties are conducted in Irene’s world. It’s a thoroughly planned, high-visibility event, and the invitations went out weeks ago. And, since Miller has all his main characters together, he’s going to do his omniscient author thing and let us know how they all navigate their way through it. And there are another ten or so friends and neighbours—not necessarily the same thing—to have them interact with. Alison is there, with the husband that Eric nearly bumped into as he left her house in that earlier chapter, and so are others keen to sniff out opportunities of one sort or another. Irene’s ‘arty’ friend Tessa has brought her blokeish playwright lover with her, the one who reads like a caricature Harold Pinter, and he’s after anybody who takes his fancy. Rita, he‘s told somebody, is the only authentic one there, but she’s known enough men like him to keep him off her.
The party is as successful as Irene could possibly have hoped. She’s prepared enough food, adding some stylish touches with exotic ingredients through the post, and Eric makes strong punch to supplement the wine and spirits. Of course David, the playwright, is rude about it, telling Bill he should have brought the bull he’s mentioned to liven things up. Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore is the standby on the record-player, practically on repeat… but, after ignoring Bill’s signal to her that he needs to get home to sleep before the early-morning milking, Rita brings out some records. She dances to the first one, is a sensation, and the party goes on late. As I said, a great success…
…except Miller has been following the thought-streams of at least three characters—not Rita, now I think of it—and those cracks that have been showing are wider than ever. With Bill it’s still low-key, as Miller lets us see how the unsatisfactory things Rita does, or has done earlier that day, snag on his consciousness. He never calls her out on any of it, of course, and if he feels any resentment he doesn’t make a thing of it. But we wonder how that will pan out when the snow arrives…. But that isn’t yet, and we see Eric and Irene together. Except, it seems, they never are together once the guests arrive. It’s her party, and it isn’t so much his respect towards her that makes him take on the role of helpful assistant, but a lack of any real interest. It’s only Alison he really thinks about—and interestingly, we’re told explicitly that as the evening goes on he starts to like the boorish David. He’s rude to everybody, including Tessa. He constantly contradicts and belittles her, and all she can do is drink until she’s sick, then more or less pass out.
Irene, despite her self-doubt—she thinks her sister does it infinitely better—is good at playing the role of middle-class hostess. She’s pleased she’s learnt how to play the game, asking the polite questions and looking terribly interested. She really is interested, we are supposed to believe—and she doesn’t miss a beat when, in her bedroom, Alison asks her which side of the bed Eric sleeps on. They are upstairs to look after the almost paralytic Tessa, but she’s asleep in her own bed by now. David is managing perfectly well on his own. Tessa has told Irene he’ll go after anything in a skirt. Or trousers—he’s talked about wanting to try out new experiences.
Other characters. They are mostly there to represent the kind of dull acquaintances a middle-class couple would have after a year or so, like the couple in the village whose hobby seems to be to match one another drink for drink. Tessa makes the mistake of trying to keep up with them, and we see how that ends. Gabby, Eric’s Greek partner, embarrasses Bill by trying to bond with him by way of their shared heritage. All the conversation does is show how totally unresolved Bill’s relationship is with his father, but Gabby is used to people’s embarrassment when he tries to tell his story of escaping the Holocaust by the skin of his teeth….
Bill squirms, and I only slowly began to realise why. Gabby is polite as Bill disengages himself from the conversation, leaving him, Gabby, standing in the same spot where he has spent the whole evening. People aren’t ready for his bleak story of having to give up everything, down to leaving their suitcases in the cemetery they’ve been confined to for days. They even had to empty their pockets before the traumatic ride in the cattle-trucks. Those death camps hover just below the surface in these middle chapters—and it’s only now that I realised Gabby was Jewish, and that, presumably, Bill is too. If he is, it’s something else unresolved in Bill’s life. Gabby’s attempts to include him in the old songs has merely embarrassed him.
And all of this is just the preamble for what’s going to come next. Boxing Day is the final chapter in Part 1, and it marks the end of the ordinary English winter they’ve had so far. When he and his wife arrive at the party, the boozy neighbour mentions the big belt of snow that’s coming from the north. On the last page, it arrives. Everybody has left by then—except Tessa and David, who are staying at Eric and Irene’s. We wonder how long they will be forced to stay, and how that will affect the dynamics—while it’s clear that Eric is still as fixated on Alison as she is on him. Miller offers a deliberately poetic description of the snow’s first arrival, as Bill and Rita trudge back to the farm. Miller has kept them at the party until the end for this:
‘They saw it first in the beam of the torch. A second later it touched their faces – an ear, a cheek, the crease of an eye. Bill shone the beam skywards. In the cone of light the flakes skittered, twisted, seemed briefly to rise rather than fall, then fell decisively, filling the darkness with a whispering that had no clear source, no centre. They shut their eyes. They tasted it. Stone-flavoured, the tips of the sky. It filled them with a great excitement of change. They laughed, standing there in the centre of the field. Then she gripped his arm, leaned into him, and with heads bowed they pushed on, no longer quite certain of their direction, the torch playing over shifting veils that seemed sometimes to rush at them, then parted to let them through.’
But there’s one word is missing from that paragraph, and it’s what is going to change their lives from now on. Snow. Bring on Part 2.
We can read it for you wholesale 