New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue… A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before and During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015). AUTHOR: A historian of late-medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov, born in 1952, first turned to fiction in the late 1970s. It was not until the 1990s, however, that his extraordinarily imaginative and daring novels come to the attention of the public. When they did, they caused acrimony and controversy. Before and During was his first novel to appear in English when it was published in 2014.