The Time Before You Die

This historical novel, set in the traumatic sixteenth century, saw the end of medieval Christendom as it was split into the sovereign states of modern Europe. This was particularly destructive in Tudor England where rapid switches in government policy shattered the lives of many.Especially affected were the monks and nuns persecuted by the wholesale dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. One of these cast-out monks, a Carthusian of the dismantled priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, was Robert Fletcher, 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 the whole of English history, Reginald Pole, a nobleman, scholar and theologian who was exiled in Italy for twenty years. He was a Cardinal, papal legate at the Council of Trent, and as Archbishop of Canterbury, with his cousin Queen Mary Tudor, they tried, in too short a time, to renew Catholic England. Pole, in the tragic last months of his life, becomes in the novel the friend of Robert Fletcher, now condemned as a heretic.

Readers will learn much about this anguished period which gave birth to Tridentine Catholicism as well as to the Anglican and other Protestant churches, and which martyred Carthusian monks and many others.

Lucy Beckett lives in Yorkshire and was educated at Cambridge University. For many years she was a professor of literature at Ampleforth Abbey. Her other books include In the Light of Christ, a comprehensive study of the Western literary tradition; and A Postcard from the Volcano. These have been warmly praised on both sides of the Atlantic. She is married and has four children.