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.