1. Andrew Miller has set a novel on the verge of great change; it’s the 1960s before it’s the 1960s. The contraceptive pill has arrived but for married women only. The Beatles are touring but are just another band playing small clubs. Great social change is beginning, particularly for women, but Irene and Rita’s lives still feel limited. What struck you about their friendship? How does their one outing together reveal their differences in both class and their lives at home?

2. Early in the novel, Eric imagines that love “might just mean a willingness to imagine another’s life.” If this is the case, which characters --- if any --- do you think succeed in loving one another? Which do not?

3. As much as the Big Freeze makes up the setting of THE LAND IN WINTER, so does the recent horror of World War II --- something that skillfully underpins the story, though Miller rarely points the lens directly towards this knowledge. In what ways do you see the characters (who would have been children and teenagers during the war) affected by this?

4. In his suicide note, Stephen Sorey writes that human beings are “addicted to violence.” Do you think this is true, in the world of the novel?

5. For Miller, writing is “how you transform yourself, others, the world. It’s your politics. It’s a kind of revolution.” What revolution occurs in THE LAND IN WINTER? What “moral,” if any, did the novel leave you with?

6. Towards the end of part one, Irene throws an elaborately planned party that much of the village attends. It’s a raucous affair that seems a quintessential snapshot of the 1960s, but it’s also the only part of the novel in which all of the main players are in the same place. This is the calm before the storm both literally and figuratively --- the threads are beginning to fray. At what points during this night do the lives of Irene, Rita, Eric and Bill begin to unravel?

7. The snow, which acts with such powerful force on each of the characters’ lives, is described in the novel’s last sentence as “meaningless.” Do you think the winter itself is portrayed as something with agency?

8. Andrew Miller has said that his characters undergo “a Hamlet-like struggle towards a moment of being able to act decisively.” What events lead towards this moment for Bill, Eric, Irene and Rita? Do you think the novel’s conclusion is inevitable, the end result of an inescapable buildup? Might things have turned out differently?

9. Much has been made of what swims under the surface of Miller’s work. For this novel, he notes it as an attempt to convey the experience of a moment, of a specific period of time. “I remember as a schoolboy,” says Miller, “there being a sort of dare whereby you pressed the tip of your tongue against the terminals of a battery. You got a little shock, not particularly painful, but it made you cry out. That ‘cry’, perhaps, is what I’ve tried to get down on the pages here.” What do you think THE LAND IN WINTER is about?