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 . . .
'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 . . .
I wanted to write A Month in the Country in space - a brief, lovely homage to the natural world, pastoral writing about how deeply humans respond to our natural environments and the relationship between beauty and survival. In the end (I guess inevitably) the two books bore very little resemblance, but I don't think Orbital would exist without it Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital