The Time Before This

The strange story of a man who saw our future in the distant past preserved as a warning to the present generation. A powerful parable of our time beautifully told with all the skill of a master story-teller.

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The Arctic held a terrible secret. On far-off Bylot Island off Baffin Island was an ice castle, strangely guarded, with the remains of an ancient, highly sophisticated civilization. Grant Shepherd had seen it, and ever since was a man possessed, a prophet equally unwelcome in the bars of the north 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. What would they do with the primordial secret, so profound in its implications for our own present-day existence?

Had there really been a civilization greater than ours, and what horror or folly had destroyed it?

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Brilliant in its invention, THE TIME BEFORE THIS is a small masterpiece. It impresses the reader at many levels - the artful simplicity of the story-telling, the subtle evocation of Western cultural-religious traditions, the forthright application to the central problem of the day. One may indeed become in spirit a member of Shepherd's flock.