The Time Before We Die by Lucy Beckett

The Time Before We Die by Lucy Beckett

A powerful, beautifully written novel of loss, finding and being found, set in a very traumatic time in European history--the Protestant Reformation. The turbulent sixteenth century saw the disintegration of medieval Christendom as it was split into sovereign states. This was particularly destructive in Tudor England, where rapid switches in government policy and religious persecution shattered the lives of many.

Especially affected were the monks and nuns who were persecuted by the wholesale dissolution of the monasteries carried out under Henry VI. One of these monks, Robert Fletcher, a Carthusian of the dismantled priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, is the hero of this novel.

The story of this strong, vulnerable man is told in counterpoint with the story of one of the most interesting men in all of English history, Reginald Pole, a nobleman, scholar and theologian who was exiled to Italy for twenty years. He was a cardinal of the Church and a papal legate at the Council of Trent. As the archbishop of Canterbury, with his cousin Queen Mary Tudor, he tried, in too short a time, to renew Catholic England. This man, in the tragic last months of his life, becomes in the novel the friend of Robert Fletcher, condemned as a heretic.

Readers will learn much from this novel of the anguished period that gave birth to Tridentine Catholicism, the Anglican Church, and other Protestant churches. This same period saw the martyrdom of Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, John Fisher and many others. The profound issues raised in this novel, which contains no altered historical facts but more human truth than facts alone can deliver, have not gone away.

Beckett, Lucy: - LUCY BECKETT is a novelist, historian and literary critic. She has published studies of Wallace Stevens and of Wagner's Parsifal with Cambridge University Press, and with Ignatius Press a major survey of the Western literary tradition in its Christian context, In the Light of Christ, as well as three novels, The Time Before You Die, set in the English Reformation, A Postcard from the Volcano, set in Weimar Germany, and The Leaves are Falling, set in the borderlands of Poland and Russia during World War II, which won the 2015 Aquinas Award for Fiction. Educated at Cambridge University, she has otherwise lived in Yorkshire all her life, is married to the musicologist John Warrack, and has four children and ten grandchildren.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781621640745
ISBN 10	1621640744
Title	The Time Before We Die
Author	Lucy Beckett
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Ignatius Press
Year published	2016-08-23
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.