I read this novella all in one sitting on the train to Bath, and I haven't been able to stop thing about it. Set in the 1920s, the main character is shellshocked WWI veteran who ventures into the British countryside to restore a mural in an old church. But it feels like more than an anti war novel, its about the end of summer, the passage of time and modernity, finding your place in a changing world. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.”
Mar 18, 2025
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Tom Birkin, a WWI vet, moves to an idyllic northern English small town to restore an uncovered mural at the town’s old chapel. This short and focused poetic little story is subtle but great, and basically a 1 day read for anyone.
Jan 5, 2023
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Stuck overnight in the empty halls of John Lennon International airport, I read this a couple of times and drove myself effectively insane, having significant ramifications on the following months. Great story.
Dec 3, 2024
It taught me how literature can carry national grief. The novel doesn’t glorify war - it strips it bare. The language is sober, devastating and shaped how I understand brutality, numbness, and the fight to stay human.
Once, in my hometown, there was an art installation where quotes from the book were engraved into tree trunks and scattered through the city:
“A lance corporal (…) drags his shattered knees behind him; another walks to the dressing station, and over his clasped hands spill his intestines. (…) The horror can be endured as long as you simply duck your head; but it kills you if you start to think about it.”
Apr 16, 2025
Top Recs from @takingtheHelm
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this quote from Dune really had me thinking about how far ahead of his time Herbert was: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Mar 10, 2025
“Dance yrself clean” by LCD soundsystem has been on repeat — the whole song is great but when it hits the 3:06 mark I transcend
Mar 9, 2025
Mar 6, 2025