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Clare Wilson, long widowed, nearly eighty, and mostly alone in the Kensington flat where she has lived for decades, is used to the losses of old age. Her oldest friend has died; after years the pain of losing a child has not faded; and the young have lives of their own to live. While she struggles to sustain her faith in God and her hope for an England which makes her increasingly unhappy and increasingly ashamed, she is astonished and sustained by the gift of a new friendship. This, appearing so late in her life, is something she could not have imagined. It brings her not only someone to talk to during the peculiar months of Covid restrictions and distancing, but understanding of a country and a tragic history of which she knew nothing. Two old people in London, keeping each other company, should surely be safe from the horrors of the outside world.
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.
