Home
Cross and Poppy: A Village Tale

Cross and Poppy: A Village Tale in Bloomington, MN
Current price: $14.99
Loading Inventory...
Size: Paperback
Trollopean clerics, comic peers with hidden depths, the villagers of a thousand cosy English novels ... but in a very modern world: our own.
The Woolfonts are the prettiest and most placid villages in England. There's a Free School; a real-ale pub; a district XI that sweeps all before it; three splendid old churches; and the duke of Taunton presiding in a kindly way over it all - and he's not, actually, the light comedy turn he chooses to pretend to be.
There's a celebrated restaurant, as well, run by the celebrated 'Hipster Chef', and he's not the only village celebrity: there's also his same-sex partner, a former Man City striker; and a former England cricketer; and a pretty Hon. - no rebel, she - who runs the Woolbury Stud; and there's Sher Mirza, English and Music master at the Free School: a devastatingly handsome British Pakistani who's an acknowledged and expert scholar of English choral and church music ... and a devout Muslim.
There's nothing wanting in the Woolfonts save a new Rector. They get him, a young, absurdly attractive Anglo-Catholic priest and recent widower from the Midlands, Fr Noel Paddick.
The villagers and gentry also get a spate of death, bigotry, persecution, fire, storms, and attempted murder. And they certainly didn't anticipate an unlikely love triangle, or that a bittersweet attachment - bringing both pain and grace to the new Rector and the English master alike - should play out, before the sympathetic villagers, between the Summer fête and the crosses and poppies of Remembrance Sunday.
The Woolfonts are the prettiest and most placid villages in England. There's a Free School; a real-ale pub; a district XI that sweeps all before it; three splendid old churches; and the duke of Taunton presiding in a kindly way over it all - and he's not, actually, the light comedy turn he chooses to pretend to be.
There's a celebrated restaurant, as well, run by the celebrated 'Hipster Chef', and he's not the only village celebrity: there's also his same-sex partner, a former Man City striker; and a former England cricketer; and a pretty Hon. - no rebel, she - who runs the Woolbury Stud; and there's Sher Mirza, English and Music master at the Free School: a devastatingly handsome British Pakistani who's an acknowledged and expert scholar of English choral and church music ... and a devout Muslim.
There's nothing wanting in the Woolfonts save a new Rector. They get him, a young, absurdly attractive Anglo-Catholic priest and recent widower from the Midlands, Fr Noel Paddick.
The villagers and gentry also get a spate of death, bigotry, persecution, fire, storms, and attempted murder. And they certainly didn't anticipate an unlikely love triangle, or that a bittersweet attachment - bringing both pain and grace to the new Rector and the English master alike - should play out, before the sympathetic villagers, between the Summer fête and the crosses and poppies of Remembrance Sunday.