A Month in the Country

Tom Birkin, a shell-shocked survivor of the Western Front, spends a summer in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby uncovering a medieval wall painting in the parish church. In the neighbouring meadow Charles Moon, another ex-soldier, excavates a burial. Birkin works, lodges with a stationmaster's family, and is drawn to Alice Keach, the young wife of the unsympathetic vicar. The novel stays with the weather, the routine of cleaning plaster, and the brief ease of two damaged men at work. It is a short fiction about recovery and withheld feeling, not a mystery in the detective sense.

Quarter-bound in dark brown buckram printed in brown with a design on cream paper boards. Light brown slipcase.