A Month in the Country

'One of the best books I've ever read' Richard Osman
'Tender and elegant' Guardian
'Unlike anything else in modern English literature' D.J. Taylor, Spectator

A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years. Adapted into a film starring Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War.

With an introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald

I wanted to write A Month in the Country in space - a brief, lovely homage to the natural world, pastoral writing about how deeply humans respond to our natural environments and the relationship between beauty and survival. In the end (I guess inevitably) the two books bore very little resemblance, but I don't think Orbital would exist without it Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital