"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 fete and the crosses and poppies of Remembrance Sunday."