A Month in the Country

This slender (135 p) book is a gem. A young man, survivor of the Great War, goes to a small village in Yorkshire in 1920 to restore a medieval painting that has been found in the parish church. His shell shock has given him a pronounced facial twitch and a stutter, his wife has run off with another man, and he is prepared to live on a pittance for the summer for the sake of having somewhere peaceful to stay and interesting work to do. The blurb on the back of the book says this is a story of lost love, and it is, but it's not simply a lost lady love. The emergence of the painting, the development of relationships with the villagers, the tentative friendship with another soldier back from the war who is supposed to be excavating a lost grave on the church grounds–all of these illuminate the themes of hell, healing, art and vocation.