The Time Before You Die
by Lucy Beckett, Ignatius Press, £13.99
This superb historical novel, first published in 1999 and now reissued in anticipation of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation next year, is set between the years 1518 and 1559. It tells the story of Robert Fletcher, a Carthusian monk, one of the many hundreds of monks expelled from their monasteries, “frightened old men turned out of their homes into the winter world”, forced out of his charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
