Lucy Beckett is an underrated Catholic novelist of originality and breadth. Her subjects have included The Time Before You Die, a sympathetic historical exploration of the life of a former Carthusian at the time of the Reformation, and A Postcard from the Volcano and its sequel, The Leaves are Falling, two novels charting the lives of a group of cultured young people caught up in the last war in Germany, Poland and Russia.
Her most recent novel, The Year of Thamar’s Book (Gracewing £20) is no less unusual in scope and interest; set in the Burgundian countryside and in Algeria between the 1960s and the present day, as a young Frenchman, Bernard, discovers a bond with his grandfather, Thamar, who has been deeply affected by conscription in the French-Algerian war of the early 1960s.
