A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr (NYRB Classics, $14). In this slim 1980 novel, a young man just back from the First World War is hired to restore a wall painting in a Yorkshire church.

Our New Scientist Book Club has been reading Sebastian Faulks’s The Seventh Son, a futuristic sci-fi thriller in which a young woman answers an ad to carry a child that is, unbeknownst to her ...

Charlie Russell is Isabelle Azaire as Sebastian Faulks’ epic tale of love and loss Birdsong returns to the stage in a ...