Published in 1980, J.L Carr’s A Month in the Country follows Tom Birkin, an art restorer on his first job who visits Oxgodby, Yorkshire following the first world war. Birkin is to spend the summer uncovering a medieval church mural, finding as much to interest him in the people of the village as the mural itself. There’s the Vicar’s wife, Alice Keach, whose kindly yet lonely manner charms Birkin fairly quickly; Kathy Ellerbeck, the teenage daughter of the stationmaster (who doubles as a Wesleyan preacher); and Charles Moon, a young man of roughly the same age, hired to find the…