At Home in Mitford

At Home in Mitford is a novel by the American writer Jan Karon, published in 1994 and the first book of The Mitford Years.

The book is a portrait of a town assembled from ordinary problems: the millionaire Miss Sadie Baxter and her opinions, the secretary who disapproves of everything, the doctor, the couple who garden, a woman who wears her dead brother's uniform and directs traffic in the middle of the town, and a dog named Barnabas who can be calmed by a verse from scripture. The chapters work as a series of visits, and the town's difficulties are mostly resolved by neighbours paying attention to one another rather than by any authority. Father Tim's own problem is that he has arranged a life with no one in it, and the novel is about the slow business of accepting company, which it treats with the same seriousness as the more dramatic troubles of his parishioners. Karon was a writer and advertising executive before this series, and the book's town made it the beginning of a long sequence of novels, of which this is the first; it was published in hardcover by Doubleday and in paperback by Penguin two years later.