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THE LAND IN WINTER by Andrew Miller (Sceptre £20, 384pp)
The Land in Winter is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The brutal winter of 1962 provides an evocative backdrop for Miller's latest, which revolves around two couples. Dr Eric Parry has left London for a country practice, his wife Irene in tow.
Now she is pregnant, as is her neighbour, <a href="https://www.travelwitheaseblog.com/?s=troubled">troubled</a>; former nightclub hostess Rita Simmonds. Meanwhile, Rita's husband Bill, son of an infamous slum landlord, is intent on reinventing himself as a gentleman farmer.
As the fog gives way to blizzard conditions, and as the affair Eric has been pursuing is revealed, the novel takes a turn for the dream-like, the other-worldly, snow-bound setting allowing scenes to become expansive and touched with strangeness.
It's a novel of suggestive lyricism and haunting moods and motifs (not least among them the unquiet ghosts of the war and its terrible crimes), brought together in a devastating denouement.
THE PLAINS by Federico Falco (Charco Press £11.99, 212pp)
The Plains is available now from the Mail Bookshop
After his long-term lover ends their relationship, the narrator of this contemplative novel leaves his home in Buenos Aires for the
pampas, there to create a garden while his wounds heal.
It's anything but bucolic - in summer the heat is crushing, the pests relentless and the dust insidious; in winter, the sky is leaden, the rain constant and the damp such that verdigris sprouts on his clothes.
As he contemplates the empty spaces of the plains - a mirror for the painful lacuna in his personal life - he meditates, too, on the nature of narratives and how they give
longed-for form to our existence.
Drawing on (among others) the wisdom of Annie Dillard and Rachel Carson, this largely avoids ponderousness as its protagonist finds, at last, a way of being at peace in the world.
THE GRANDDAUGHTER by Bernhard Schlink (W&N £20, 336pp)
The Granddaughter is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Although Schlink's novel was published in 2021 in Germany, the resurgence of the hard-Right Alternative für Deutschland in the east of the country lends it a sense of urgency.
Its focus is bookseller Kaspar who, before unification, perilously smuggled his wife Birgit from East to West. Now Birgit is dead and her secret coming to light: a daughter, Svenja, whom she gave up at birth.
When Kaspar finally traces her, <a href="https://jetblacktransportation.com/blog/town-car-service-new-york-city-reviews/">town car service new york city reviews</a> he finds her embedded in a rural community of neo-Nazis. What's more, Svenja's own teenage daughter, <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/search?source=nav-desktop&q=Sigrun%20-">Sigrun -</a> Kaspar's granddaughter - is no less indoctrinated. Yet Kaspar, grief-stricken and lonely, is determined to win her back.
Part knotty family drama, part painful examination of German identity, the novel is at its most compelling when documenting the tightrope that Kaspar must walk with Holocaust-denying Sigrun - her reactions to visiting the former Ravensbruck concentration camp in particular are chilling.
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