The Time Before This Author:Nicholas Monsarrat The setting of The Time Before This is that magnificently forbidding area of Canada that borders Hudson Strait, where thrusting industrial exploration, rough and raw, meets the technical virtuosity of the DEW line and where the towering blue ice of Baffinland, carved into fantastic shapes by the winds and weather of centuries, hints at primordia... more »l secrets.
The Time Before This concerns one such secret - the remains of an ancient, highly sophisticated civilization - so profound in its implications for our own present day existence that afterward its discoverer, Grant Shepherd, was a man possessed, a prophet equally unwelcome in the makeshift bars of the Northland and in the assemblies of the United Nations. For his convictions he was doubted, reviled, sacrificed. And at the end there were only two who followed him: Mary, the girl of the camps, and Peter Benton, the reporter from the Toronto Journal. Those two alone really listened to Shepherd's story, and believed.« less