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In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage.  Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering … 

In this episode we talk to Andrew Miller about his latest novel, which some have called his best yet, The Land in Winter. For his Toaster Challenge Andrew selects Light Years by James Salter.

This episode is supported by a Project Award from the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
Intro/outro music: Colm Mac Con Iomaire, ‘Thou Shalt Not Carry’ from The Hare’s Corner, 2008, with thanks to Colm for permission to use it. Logo designed by Freya Sirr.

Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free and  The Slowworm's Song.  Andrew Miller's novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

The Land in Winter  was a best book of the year for the Independent, Guardian, and Good Housekeeping.

'Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect. A novel that hits your cells and can be felt there, without your brain really knowing what's happened to it. Superb'  
SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital  
  
'Delicate and devastating'  
INDEPENDENT, The 20 best books of the year  
  
'Miller may have written his best book yet . . . brilliance that is not to be missed'  
GUARDIAN, The best fiction of 2024  
  
'Incredibly satisfying'  
FINANCIAL TIMES  
  
'A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose'  
MAIL ON SUNDAY  
  
'Perfect'  
RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER  
  
'I loved The Land in Winter . . . There were moments I thought of Penelope Fitzgerald - that moment I have always loved in The Beginning of Spring when the birch trees seem to grow hands - those liminal moments that are kind of beyond words, or explanation, but Miller finds them anyway. It's a thing of rare beauty'  
RACHEL JOYCE, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry  
  
'Disruptive and graceful beyond anything I've read'  
SARAH HALL, author of Burntcoat  
  
December 1962, the West Country.  
  
PRAISE FOR ANDREW MILLER
 
'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight'  
HILARY MANTEL  
  
'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind'  
SUNDAY TIMES  
  
'A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts'  
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY  
  
'A highly intelli

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