Allow 1-3 weeks for delivery within the 50 United States The Time Before You Die is a novel of loss, finding and being found, set in a traumatic period in Europe. The sixteenth century saw the disintegration of medieval Christendom as it was split into sovereign states. This process was particularly destructive in Tudor England where rapid switches in government policy 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 VIII. One of these 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 of the Church, 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. This man, 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 from this novel of the anguished period which gave birth to Tridentine Catholicism as well as to the Anglican and other Protestant churches, and which martyred Carthusian monks as well as Thomas More and Thomas Cranmer. 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.

"Lucy Beckett combines scholarship with imagination to tell the story of an evicted Carthusian monk and of a great ecclesiastical statesman who tragically failed to save England for the Catholic Church. An enlightening, moving, historical novel that is a pleasure to read."
- Piers Paul Read
Author, Alive: The Andes Survivors

"Where would each of us cast our allegiance if we had been caught in the midst of the English Reformation? This novel places us in the turbulent time where we experience the common trauma of the day, and then, as in all excellent historical fiction, we find ourselves asking 'Where does my choice lie?' Seldom has this challenge been given so well."
- Michael O'Brien
Author, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse

Lucy Beckett lives in Yorkshire, close to Rievaulx Abbey where part of this novel is set, and she teaches at Ampleforth Abbey. She studied history at Cambridge, and the breadth of her interests has led to books on Wallace Stevens, York Minster and Wagner's Parsifal. A collection of her poems, The Returning Wave, was published in 1996. She is married with four children.