Read more
The Year of Thamar’s Book is set in the months from the spring of 2015 to the
summer of 2016. An elderly recluse living in a quiet village in Burgundy
discovers he is not as alone in the world as he has for many years assumed.
His grandson, well-educated but ignorant, comes to the village to help the old man
make a book of the pile of chaotic manuscript that tells the story of a difficult,
painful yet luminous life. As he writes, and listens, the young man learns a good
deal, and begins to comprehend not only how French colonial history and the
horrors of war in Algeria formed and hurt his grandfather, but also how their lasting
consequences are still damaging his country and his own family. At the same time
he begins to understand his grandfather’s faith.
About the author
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.
