Reading Order
A Month in the Country Reading Order
J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country (1980) is the short, lyrical novel of a shell-shocked World War I veteran named Tom Birkin who spends a summer in a Yorkshire village restoring a medieval painting on a church wall — the best summer of his life, a time of happiness so complete that he will spend the rest of his existence measuring everything else against it. One of the most celebrated British novels of the twentieth century, it won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Its narrator, speaking from decades later, captures with exact precision the quality of recovered peace and the specific sadness of knowing, even as happiness is happening, that it cannot last.
Where to start
A Month in the Country
Complete A Month in the Country Book List
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A Month in the Country
J.L. Carr·1980·The complete novel — 90 pages. Carr's other novels, including The Harpole Report and How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup, are much lighter in tone; A Month in the Country stands alone as his serious literary masterpiece.
A Month in the Country — Frequently Asked Questions
Is A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr worth reading?
A Month in the Country is consistently cited by readers and critics as one of the most perfect short novels in English — a book of ninety pages that produces an emotional effect out of all proportion to its length. Its admirers include Sebastian Faulks, who cited it as one of the formative books of his life, and it appears regularly on lists of the greatest British novels of the twentieth century despite being largely unknown outside dedicated readers of literary fiction. It is worth reading by anyone who loves The Remains of the Day, Gilead, or Stoner — novels in which quiet lives produce vast emotional resonance.
Is there a film of A Month in the Country?
Yes. A Month in the Country was adapted as a film in 1987, directed by Pat O'Connor and starring Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh — Firth as Tom Birkin, the shell-shocked veteran restoring the medieval painting, and Branagh as Moon, the archaeologist working in the adjacent field. The film is generally regarded as a faithful and moving adaptation, though the novel's retrospective narration — the note of late-life reflection on the summer — is difficult to fully capture on screen.
What should I read after A Month in the Country?
Readers who loved A Month in the Country typically move to The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (another novel of retrospective regret and English melancholy), Stoner by John Williams (the American equivalent of a quiet life producing vast feeling), and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (another retrospective letter from an aging man to someone who will read it after his death). For other short masterpieces in the same spirit, Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley are close companions.
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