The biography of JL Carr, written by Byron Rogers
 
JL 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 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 and a publisher (from his own back bedroom in Kettering) of some of the most eccentric, collectable - and smallest - books ever printed.
 
His masterpiece, A Month in the Country, the moving story of a First World War survivor, won the Guardian Fiction Award and was made into a film starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth; How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup is acknowledged as the funniest novel ever written about football, and The Harpole Report as the best novel about a school. Meanwhile Carr's own self-published Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary Cricketers is a tiny classic with an enormous cult reputation.
 
But their author was an elusive person - someone different to everyone who met him. Now, Byron Rogers, who knew him well, tells for the first time the full story of JL Carr's life, a tale both surprising and extraordinarily varied, from war service on a West African flying boat base to a strange interlude teaching in the heart of South Dakota. It reveals a quixotic, civic-minded and thoroughly decent man, who would hold arithmetic races on sports day, paved his garden with the printing plates from his hand-drawn maps, and led his schoolchildren through the streets of Kettering to hymn the beauty of the cherry trees - and, above all, a novelist whose fiction is more thoroughly autobiographical than anyone has hitherto realised.
 
The Last Englishman is more than the fascinating life of a truly unique individual: it is a frequently comic and always touching portrait of the best kind of Englishness.