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Published: 15 September 2011
by SIMON WROE

THE coldest entry on this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist – in terms of recorded temperature at any rate – is Snowdrops, AD Miller’s debut novel about corruption and lust in the Russian winter.

Mr Miller, the Economist’s Moscow correspondent between 2004 and 2007 (he is now the newspaper’s Britain editor), has written a crime story in which the weather is a character in its own right: a cruel sort who slaps faces, kills homeless people and hides dark secrets beneath the snow.

His descriptions of winter and how it shapes the behaviour of the city’s inhabitants are brilliant; you shiver as you read them.

But Miller was nowhere near Russia when he wrote the book. He was tucked up in the Kentish Town house where he lives with his wife and two young children. The country, it seems, had got into his bones.

“If you have a novel inside you then Russia will probably liberate it. It’s a place that’s so conducive to fiction,”  he says.

“It throws up these moral challenges and dilemmas that are one of the key ingredients of fiction – they’re an everyday feature of Russian life. The society lends itself to novel writing.”

Although the murky deeds the book describes are “quintessential post-Soviet crimes”, Miller stresses that it is not a definitive view of Russia.

“If you set it in a foreign country there is the assumption that this is the final word on that country, which it isn’t. There are a lot of wonderful things about Russia. But it is definitely the case that Russia is a profoundly and corrosively corrupt country. Corruption is the organising principle of life.”

Miller cites a public opinion poll during his time in Russia that ranked “criminal” as the country’s second most criminal profession. The most popular answer was “police”.

Snowdrops is not a rosy view of Russia, to put it mildly. The title is Moscow slang for corpses that are revealed when the snow thaws.

But the book reflects as much on human nature – “how a normal person can become complicit in very bad deeds” – as it does on the post-Soviet landscape. This is Russia through the eyes and experiences of a sleazy 30-something expat, which Miller is at pains to point out is not him.

“I didn’t get up to many of the things that he does,” he says. “I lived in Russia with my wife and had a very different lifestyle, but I did meet people like that. [The main character] is representative of a particular time in the years before the credit crunch, when people didn’t ask questions about how they made their money.”

Unlike most of his competition on the Booker shortlist, Julian Barnes et al, the 36-year-old is a newcomer to the world of fiction. Miller’s previous book, The Earl of Petticoat Lane, is a family history.

He wrote Snowdrops on weekends and “retreated into initials” (his name is Andrew David) to avoid confusion with another, “more successful” Andrew Miller.

Nor does he come from a literary background. His father ran a textile business and then a travel agent’s in Hendon; his mother is a musician.

So the nomination for one of the most prestigious prizes in fiction came as something of a shock.

“I was amazed, completely amazed,” says Miller. “I was thrilled when somebody wanted to publish it.

The idea that it would be on the Booker shortlist would have seemed other worldly to me when I was writing it.

“It is fantastical me now that it’s happened. I haven’t made any notes for my acceptance speech because I think it’s very unlikely that I’ll have to deliver one. I’m not having any sleepless nights over what happens next.”

There are “embryonic” plans for a second novel, possibly set in London. All he knows for sure is that it won’t be Russia.

Miller has got the cold out of his bones at last.

• Snowdrops. By AD Miller. Atlantic Books, £7.99.