The Land in Winter

As Liz, who loved this book too—it was her second-favorite Booker nominee last year—said to me before I read it, it's not doing anything that hasn't been done before, with its plot of adultery and subtle class friction in the English countryside. But what it does do—my goodness. Miller has been best-known for his finely placed historical fiction, and really, that's what this book is too, even though it's not set in Revolution-era France or Japan in the '40s but during Miller's lifetime, in the harsh December of 1962. From the paraffin heaters to the trendy canapés to the house-call protocol of a country doctor to—most crucially—the internal lives of its handful of characters, Miller's old-fashioned story is both graceful and riveting in its lived-in detail. I loved it.