Book description
J. L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: a man who spent most
of his working life in the middle of Middle England, as headmaster of
a Northamptonshire school, an enthusiastic follower of cricket and a
tireless campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he
was also the author of half a dozen of the quirkiest, most comic
novels in English, a publisher (from his own back bedroom in
Kettering) of some of the most eccentric, collectable - and smallest -
books ever printed, and an enigmatic, elusive individual. Among Carr's
novels are "A Month in the Country", his moving story of a
World War I survivor that is now a Penguin Classic - which won the
Guardian Fiction Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made
into a highly successful film starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin
Firth; "How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup", now
published as a Prion Humour Classic and acclaimed as one of the
funniest novels ever written about football, and "The Harpole
Report", acknowledged to be one of the funniest novels ever
written about a school. Meanwhile his own self-published "Carr's
Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers" became the smallest
bestseller ever printed. This biography tells the life story of this
fascinating man - a life both surprising and varied, from war service
on a West African flying-boat base to a strange interlude teaching in
the heart of South Dakota - and discovers a headmaster who would hold
arithmetic races on sports day, a mysterious individual who buried all
his treasures in his garden and was someone different to everyone who
met him, and a novelist whose fiction is partially autobiographical.
