A Month in the Country

A Month in the Country is a fiction novel published in 1980 by the British author J.L. Carr, a retired schoolteacher and publisher. The novel tells the deceptively spare tale of Thomas Birkin, a veteran of World War One who, having just returned from overseas, accepts summer employment to restore a mural. Dating back nearly five centuries, the mural adorns the wall of an old country church in northern England. During the weeks he painstakingly restores the mural, which has been carelessly covered by layers of whitewash, Birkin comes to realize the mural, which depicts the Final Judgment, is far more valuable than the church parson who hired him realizes. Birkin finds in the happy isolation of the remote rural community the chance to recover from the considerable emotional toll of his hellish war experiences and the collapse of his marriage.

The novel received the Guardian Prize, awarded annually from 1965 to 1999 by the editors of London’s The Guardian newspaper to the most accomplished work of fiction published in the United Kingdom. In addition, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, an annual British prize awarded to the finest novel published in the English-language, then as now considered the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom.