This novel is shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025, so I thought it would be good to read it. The events of the novel are focused on the big freeze of 1962/63, as seen through the eyes of a struggling farmer, Bill, and the local doctor, Eric, as well as their pregnant partners, Rita and Irene. They all live in a village near Bristol.

Bill is an unlikely character, coming into farming as an alternative to the family firm – dodgy deals in property with a whiff of Rackman – and, apparently, having very little idea of how to do it. He met Rita, the blowsy girl from the estate agents, while she was showing him around a farm. She has a bit of a past for once working in a seedy post-war club.

Eric is the local doctor and, sometimes, a bit of a caricature – as well as having an affair with Alison who is what you might call a better off piece of stuff. The story deals with that affair, Bill’s useless work as a farmer and the two women struggling to cope with pregnancy. There’s more, but the central character of the novel is really the weather.

Does it work? Well, I was 14 years of age in 1962 when the big freeze began and it was cold and extended but most people got on with it without freezing to death or stumbling around in the snowdrifts without shoes.

So, as the relationships get frosty, the weather gets colder. There’s a lot of snow and ice which disrupts events and quite a bit of incompetent activity designed to keep warm. The idea is to show that this was a post-war era, somehow on the cusp of becoming the swinging 60s but not quite there. There’s some big social comment here and quite a lot about the war although it ended some time previously.

It was only a few months after the Cuban missile crisis where my class at grammar school all dived under the desks when the nuclear bombers scrambled from Greenham Common. The Vietnam War and the bomb were major anxieties and older people, at least those I observed, seemed to have no wish to revisit their memories of the Second World War. On the contrary, I think they were suppressed.

Harold Macmillan was telling people that they had never had it so good and that was partly true in terms of rising national prosperity and new technologies like refrigerators, hoovers and television but, apparently, all this wasn’t detectable in rural Wiltshire! At a Christmas party, they play Stranger on the Shore by Acker Bilk when, frankly, there was better music around for parties!

Somehow, the story is out of kilter with the period it is set in, despite the constant name-dropping of things you might have had, or done, in 1962 from some sort of Wikipedia list. I was quite happy then, and so my aunts and uncles appeared to be!

There’s also a Christmas party which is a kind of pastiche with the recipes informed by a women’s magazine and a discussion of ‘croquettes’ when the pregnant women get together. The women do not come out of the novel well anywhere, struck down by morning sickness, drinking gin and leading rather dull and aimless lives.

Basically, the characters here might have been just about realistic in the early 1950s when there was still some rationing, village shops, everyone knew everyone’s business and life was hard but there wasn’t a big freeze then to hang the message of social transformation on! It all seems slightly contrived.

So, no, it shouldn’t win the Booker prize and, by the way, the chances of Rita listening to Bobby’s girl by Marcie Blane on the radio are zero. She will be listening to the UK cover version by Susan Maughan which was the big hit in England!