Everyone has one stretch of life they go all quiet remembering.
A Month in the Country
A traumatized veteran restores a medieval church mural during an English summer that will quietly reshape the rest of his life.
168g
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals
- Lightweight
- Quiet Companion
- Fiction
A shell-shocked veteran spends a summer uncovering a medieval mural hidden beneath layers of whitewash in a village church, and bit by ordinary bit, Carr does the same thing to you. Nothing grand happens. It's understated, dryly funny, and exquisitely observed. Then, in the final pages, Carr quietly takes the floor out from under you. Everyone has one stretch of life they go quiet remembering. This is that rare, perfect book you won't even feel in your pack.
Field notes
In 1964, Carr discovered a derelict medieval church in Northamptonshire and spent more than a decade campaigning to save it from demolition. That stubborn act of preservation eventually inspired A Month in the Country. But the novel's most important acts may be the ones that never occur. Carr deliberately constructed a story around missed possibilities, later joking that writing about things that don't happen saved an enormous amount of imaginative effort. The man who fought to save an old church wrote a novel about everything preservation cannot accomplish.