He was excited by the prospect of uncovering and restoring a recently discovered medieval wall-painting in the village church. He has been commissioned under a bequest to carry out restoration work on a Medieval mural in the local church and has an appointment to keep with the Reverend J. The rain had ceased and dew glittered on the graveyard grass, gossamer drifted down air-currents… And as it lightened, a vast and magnificent landscape unfolded. Although, no matter what age, we always have some fond memory of a time in our early childhood or our young adulthood that will give us pause. Birkin is excited about the task ahead, and is an optimistic soul who tends to look on the bright side of things.

It was lovely to read of new friendship ties forged with the Ellerbeck family, Alice Keach (the vicar’s wife), and Charles Moon (an outsider like Birkin himself on a different mission of uncovering a buried past). Employed to recover a concealed medieval painting on the wall of the local church, Thomas believes that a change of scenery will soothe the scars the bloodbath of war and a shattered marriage have imprinted on him. Birkin has accepted the employment as a way to get away from London—he knows no one in Oxgodby­­—and as a chance perhaps to reboot his life. He has a wife who has betrayed him, a war that has wounded him, and a world that is telling him that his skills are obsolete.There is potential for Birkin to have a relationship, but that would have spoilt the subtlety of the whole thing. Carr has a knack for bringing certain scenes into sudden, sharp focus, rather as waves lift forgotten things to the surface. For Tom Birkin that serenity only took one summer month, one month in the idyllic English village of Oxgodby. Why did she care about why her forebear was not buried in the churchyard, and where he was laid to rest? As a human, an artist of sorts, an estranged husband, and war veteran, we see Birkin’s hardened attitude towards his life and the hopeful contentment he feels towards his future.

Used books have different signs of use and might not include supplemental materials such as CDs, Dvds, Access Codes, charts or any other extra material. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. I'd seen enough paintings to know beauty when I saw it and, in this out of the way place, here it was before me. In the final paragraphs Carr tries to shift the focus from the vicar’s wife to the sustaining noblesse of artistic aspiration but it felt a bit forced. I look again, and watch myself, a brand new mother, rocking my baby during one of our midnight meetings, in the stillness, the newborn puzzle piece nested against my breast.Even though this out of the way life is not what Birkin had envisioned for himself, he welcomes the opportunity to get out of his situation and avoid the present mess of his marriage. An extraordinary, heart-rending novel, written as a sort of twilight benediction to a pastoral place and its people. What we are experiencing now, stress in all its fanciful disguises and new medical definitions, is something every generation has gone through since time immemorial. The rural landscape of fields, hills and woods, the slow-paced, deliberate life-style of the people, their habits and customs, even the weather, are described in beautiful prose by Carr.

In my case, however, it's unfortunately one of those texts that is going to send me off on a long personal anecdote, for which I offer advance apologies. For me, Levin's story in Anna Karenina was the most excruciatingly boring piece of literature I've read. I found myself saying "glorious" several times and then stopping to thank my parents for instilling in me their love of reading. Especially when we’re introduced to another potential love interest who, it turns out, will make one appearance in the narrative and then vanish. He and Moon are a very different pair (not a couple): both are ex-army, spending the summer funded by a bequest from Miss Hebron (in Moon’s case, he has to find the missing grave of an ancestor).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.