Continuing with my rundown of the best books I read in 2025, we come to “A Month in the Country” by J.L. Carr. This slim, meditative book is quite different from Emily Henry’s “Beach Read,” and it haunted me for weeks after reading it.
Tom Birkin, an art historian and Great War veteran, takes a job in an English country village to restore a medieval mural in the parish church. He’s on the run from a broken marriage, and from the memories and traumas of the war, and hopes to lose himself in the work of bringing the mural back to life.
Over the course of the summer, Birkin is drawn into village life, though he keeps himself at a bemused remove. It’s not until he encounters another veteran, engaged in an archeological dig in the churchyard sponsored by a village notable searching for an ancestor who may or may not be buried beyond the consecrated graveyard, that he acknowledges the horrors of the war that have hovered in the background.
This is a quiet, elegiacal, meditative book; not a great deal happens, but what does happen is of great import, at least on reflection. The prose is subtle and direct — it reminded me a bit of Sigrid Undset’s short stories — with no unnecessary flourishes.
