A Month in the Country - Couverture rigide

A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.'That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.'One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives in the village of Oxgodby. He has been invited to uncover and restore a medieval wall painting in the local church. At the same time, Charles Moon - a fellow damaged survivor of the war - has been asked to locate the grave of a village ancestor. As these two outsiders go about their work of recovery, they form a bond, but they also stir up long dormant passions within the village. What Berkin discovers here will stay with him for the rest of his life . . .

Tender and elegant (Guardian)

Unlike anything else in modern English Literature (D.J. Taylor Spectator)

Carr's blessedly small tale of lost love is also a small hymn about art and the compensating joy of the artist, both in giving and receiving. It stays with us, too, and is oddly haunting (New Yorker)

Carr has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past (Penelope Fitzgerald)