The Land in Winter
Andrew Miller
Shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller is a tender portrait of loneliness and the warmth of human connection. Set in England’s West Country during the Big Freeze of 1962-63, the novel shifts between the perspectives of two couples who are expecting their first child. Eric, the local doctor, has a pristine reputation, but this is cracking under the weight of an affair. His wife, Irene, whose entire existence has shrunk to her role as a housewife, is struggling to simply be seen. Across a field lives Bill, the son of a rich Eastern European immigrant, who has taken up farming on a whim and is riddled with questions of his heritage. His wife, Rita, a dancer who has traded nightclubs for feeding chickens, is increasingly tormented by the voices in her head.
The blossoming friendship between opposites Irene and Rita against the bleak backdrop of winter is where this novel really sings. At the beginning they are each like a lighthouse to each other — a blinking in the distance that signals they are not alone. As Rita says, Irene’s house — which she can see from her bathroom window — is "like a ship anchored off the coast, riding out the weather". As the novel progresses, they begin to shed the layers they have bundled themselves up in, and in doing so, for the first time in a long time they are able to experience the kind of pure joy often lost in adulthood.
Miller masterfully balances the cosiness of sinking into the mundanity of the characters’ everyday lives as they are frozen in time waiting for new life to burst forth, with the slow foreboding of the approaching storm. As the snow and secrets begin to pile up, cutting the characters off from each other, there is the sense each of them is hurtling towards disaster. Will they lose themselves completely in the blizzard, or manage to break the ice between them? Through glimpses of quiet moments and unspoken words, The Land in Winter hits like an avalanche.
Endling
Maria Reva
Maria Reva’s darkly comic Endling begins as a chaotic journey across Ukraine in which a cast of offbeat characters are thrust together in the most bizarre of circumstances. Yeva is a struggling scientist living out of her mobile lab, caring for endangered snails in the hopes they will breed instead of becoming "endlings" — last known individuals of their species. To fund her research, she has started moonlighting as a bride at romance tours for Westerners. It is here she meets fellow-bride Nastia and her older sister, Sol, who is posing as her interpreter. Recently abandoned by their mother, the founder of a radical feminist group, they are planning to kidnap a group of bachelors to bring the world’s attention to the sexism in the marriage industry. But they need a getaway vehicle — which is where Yeva comes in.
Just as this road-trip-cum-heist picks up speed, Russia launches its invasion on Ukraine. The shock of it is so catastrophic it doesn’t just derail the characters’ lives, it explodes the very form of the novel and reality begins to seep in through the cracks. Once the strings behind the story are exposed through a metafictional twist, Endling’s focus on survival expands beyond the characters to encompass art in the time of conflict. Reva reflects on who has the right to tell the story of war, whose voices are heard and whose are left behind, and how such a story should be written. She wrestles with the best way to do the people of Ukraine justice — by focusing solely on the dystopian-esque terror of the outbreak of war, or by taking the road less travelled and finding "light in these dark times".
Endling tackles big questions with heart and the sharpest of wit. Reva harnesses humour to make the horror of the events hit even harder. Despite how absurd some of the novel’s antics are, it never strays too far from its roots in the present moment. It is gripping from the word go, skewing expectations and surprising at every bend in the road.
Sunbirth
An Yu
An Yu’s lyrical Sunbirth feels like a fever dream. In the surrealist dreamscape of Five Poems Lake, the sun has slowly been disappearing for 12 years. Half of it is now gone, and no-one is any closer to figuring out why. As the days grow darker, the unnamed narrator tries to keep up her normal life manning her family’s traditional-medicine pharmacy: "people had to live, after all". But then a large chunk of the sun disappears, and residents start turning into "Beacons" — zombie-like creatures whose heads have been replaced with miniature suns. Her quest for enlightenment intensifies when she and her sister, her last living relative, start peering into their shadowy past and discover the unexplained death of their father may hold the answers.
Yu explores the importance of the places that make us and how indebted we can feel to them — sometimes to our own detriment. The narrator has been holding out hope in the face of doom for years, tending to her neighbours with medicine and watering her grief for her father — while all the other plants are dying, the camellia planted over her father’s urn is flourishing. She has to decide whether to finally let go and flee the only home she has ever known, to risk venturing into the desert surrounding the town from which no-one has returned. Yu also shines a light on how a community on the brink of catastrophe copes. The characters are pulled between succumbing to an every-man-for-himself mentality and banding together to try to make it through this shared nightmare.
Sunbirth is speculative fiction at its finest. Each shard of light the narrator finds while stumbling in the dark illuminates more questions than answers, and part of the joy of reading Sunbirth is trying to piece these together. Dread permeates throughout the novel, but equally, and strangely, so does hope.
