Now is the Time - Softcover

Fast and entertaining - the excitement of a city about to blow up like a barrel of gunpowder is more than palpable - and the period brought to life with visceral minutiae. * Lucy Scholes, Observer * A vivid and surprisingly tender tribute to one of the wildest moments in Plantagenet history. * Dan Jones, The Times * Bragg brings his historical characters vividly to life and conveys a real sense of the appalling disparity in living conditions. The novel gathers unstoppable pace as the original poll tax uprising hurtles towards its brutal and unedifying conclusion. * Simon Humphreys, Mail on Sunday * Bragg excels at conjuring the wealth and squalor of late 14th-century London . . . it's impossible not to be caught up. * Daily Mail * A beautifully written novel, combining modern insight with historical authenticity, and it is spellbinding. * Kate Atherton, Sunday Express * Bragg lifts the bare facts of England's largest uprising and transforms them into a high-speed adventure, told from the alternating perspectives of the key players. Readable and pacy * Zoe Apostolides, Financial Times * A gripping historical novel . . . his moving portraits of Tyler and Ball, their utopian hopes for England betrayed and destroyed just as they themselves are doomed to be, give Now Is the Time its real backbone and intensity. -- Nick Rennison * The Sunday Times *

Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster. His novels include The Hired Man, for which he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, Without a City Wall, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Soldier's Return, winner of the WHSmith Literary Award, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines, both of which were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Place in England, which was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, and most recently Grace and Mary. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Adventure of English and The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011. He lives in London and Cumbria.