A Month in the Country

By J. L. Carr
Introduction by Michael Holroyd

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.

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View the reading group guide (PDF)

Reviews

Unlike anything else in modern English Literature.
— The Spectator

This masterwork of English literature...is, quite simply, an object of desire.
— Vogue

Carr's prose is spare, elegant and buoyed with wit; the idyllic countryside and its inhabitants are rendered in affectionate detail.
— Publishers Weekly

The work is virtually perfect, and written with a great deal of liveliness and wit.
— Michael Wood

Carr has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past.
— Penelope Fitzgerald

A Month in the Country... is one of those perfect, precious novels that you want to loan to friends, buy all your relatives for Christmas and give to your latest paramour.
— Eve Claxton, Time Out New York

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.
— The New Yorker

A unique and special experience, a visit to a special time and place, deeply observed and portrayed in beautiful prose.
— Washington Post

Also see:

The Enchanted April By Elizabeth von Arnim Introduction by Cathleen Schine Four women who share only their unhappiness and a love of wisteria flee 1920s London and converge on a magical villa in Portofino Italy in this charming comedy of manners that has been called "a feast of flowers"—Times Literary Supplement.

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