Unclay

John Death arrives in the obscure Dorset village of Little Dodder carrying a divine parchment with the names of two inhabitants he has come to unclay. Then he loses it. Bound to stay until it turns up, Death settles in for the summer among the villagers, and slowly, unexpectedly, he begins to acquire a taste for life.

T. F. Powys wrote his novels, fables and stories in the village of East Chaldon during the 1920s and early 1930s, and this late work shows him at his most distinctive: a fable about God, mortality, good and evil, told with a wry, dark humour and a strange, rustic beauty all his own. It is a book for readers who like their English fiction odd, spiritual and quietly funny, and who suspect the countryside holds deeper mysteries than it lets on.