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Great books for the sports fan in your life

A Month in the Country

A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 
 
'That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.' 
 
One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives in the village of Oxgodby. He has been invited to uncover and restore a medieval wall painting in the local church. At the same time, Charles Moon - a fellow damaged survivor of the war - has been asked to locate the grave of a village ancestor. As these two outsiders go about their work of recovery, they form a bond, but they also stir up long dormant passions within the village. What Berkin discovers here will stay with him for the rest of his life . . .

James Lloyd Carr, born 1912, attended the village school at Carlton Miniott in the North Riding and Castleford Secondary School. He died in Northamptonshire in 1994. His novel A Month in the Country won the Guardian Fiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a memorable film.

'That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.' 
 
One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives in the village of Oxgodby. He has been invited to uncover and restore a medieval wall painting in the local church. At the same time, Charles Moon - a fellow damaged survivor of the war - has been asked to locate the grave of a village ancestor. As these two outsiders go about their work of recovery, they form a bond, but they also stir up long dormant passions within the village. What Berkin discovers here will stay with him for the rest of his life . . .

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'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

The book I keep coming back to, it's one of the best books I've ever read. I've never met anyone who didn't love it

Unlike anything else in modern English Literature

Carr's blessedly small tale of lost love is also a small hymn about art and the compensating joy of the artist, both in giving and receiving. It stays with us, too, and is oddly haunting

Carr has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past

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 1987 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.

J L Carr

It's a comic story about sportsmanship and underdogs; it's also a slightly wistful portrait of village life and provincial decency, as well as a beautifully written hymn to doggedness and eccentricity. This gently humorous novella is the anti-Ronaldo.

An extraordinary performance, simultaneously one of the greatest football novels ever written and a penetrating report card from a world where fiction rarely lingers, at once a comic masterpiece and a study in national temperament that the doughtiest social historian would struggle to match.

'But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want it to believe it.' J.L. Carr 
 
Very strange and extremely funny, this uncategorizable novel is a surreal fantasy set, vaguely, in the early 1970s, during one highly memorable football season. Steeple Sinderby Wanderers, in their new all-buttercup-yellow stripe, start it by ravaging the Fenland League and end it with a phenomenal nail-biter against Glasgow Rangers. 
 
Told through unreliable recollection, florid local newspaper coverage and bizarre committee minutes, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is somehow both entertaining and very moving. There will never be players again like Alex Slingsby, Sid 'the Shooting Star' Swift and the immortal milkman-turned-goalkeeper Monkey Tonks.

J L Carr

Praise for How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup

It's a comic story about sportsmanship and underdogs; it's also a slightly wistful portrait of village life and provincial decency, as well as a beautifully written hymn to doggedness and eccentricity. This gently h ...

An extraordinary performance, simultaneously one of the greatest football novels ever written and a penetrating report card from a world where fiction rarely lingers, at once a comic masterpiece and a study in natio ...

Books by J L Carr

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Great books for the sports fan in your life

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