What an utter treat to open the Festival with prize-winning Andrew Miller and his acclaimed novel The Land in Winter – a masterclass in storytelling, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. With its flawless evocation of time and place, the novel transports us to the ferocious winter of 1962–63, the harshest in living memory, where two young marriages are quietly and profoundly tested.

As blizzards close in on a West Country village, secrets surface, hopes falter and the ordinary business of living becomes both difficult and necessary. Tender, immersive and psychologically acute, The Land in Winter explores love, duty, regret and resilience with luminous prose and extraordinary emotional precision. Come and hear Andrew Miller discuss a novel widely praised as one of his finest achievements, and discover why he is regarded as one of Britain’s most subtle, daring and dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.

Chaired by broadcaster Alex Clark.

Venue: Palmerston Room

Duration: 1 hour