This Time of Dying

It is October 1918, and England is gathering its dead. For Henry Speake, of Speake & Son Undertakers, laying to rest the shattered bodies of young men sent home from the front has become a grimly familiar reality. But what he is seeing now, as influenza claims its victims with increasing speed and force, is something different: for the first time in his life, Henry feels overwhelmed by death. Unable to share his fears with his waspish, disapproving sisters, Henry turns to Mrs Allen Thompson, a recently widowed school teacher, so beginning a friendship which gradually, stumblingly, pulls them in a direction neither has been prepared for. Inspired by the deaths of the author's grandparents in the Spanish flu epidemic, "This Time of Dying" is a powerfully imagined story of love and redemption in a world where nothing can be taken for granted any more.