A Month in the Country is the poignant and redemptive tale of a man, Tom Birkin, who returns from the Great War reeling from both his shell-shock and broken marriage. An expert on restoring medieval murals, he accepts a job in a remote Yorkshire village. As Birkin works, he delicately strips away not just the covering paint on the church wall, but the pain that has washed over his heart and mind. The term "soul-searching" could be fairly applied to this bittersweet tale of a man gradually finding a small measure of peace and consolation in his shattered life.

Pastoral and profound. Life itself with the addition of work to do heals life's tragedies. Opportunites are missed but one carries on. This is a beautiful and luminous story reminding one of Thomas Hardy and a simpler approach to existence.

In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.

Publisher: New York Review of Books
Distributor: Random House, Inc.
Publication Date: 10-31-2000
Pages: 160
Measurements: 7.99in X 4.76in X .43in X .365lb