I learned things from the script I didn't know. I just thought, "Can that be right? Were we that perilously close?" And so it just grabbed me. (Gary Oldman on Darkest Hour)

Provides a compelling look at life and politics in the Vatican today (Julia Vitale Vanity Fair, This Winter?s Best Nonfiction Reads)

Anthony McCarten has an astonishing knack of transforming a familiar story into a new tale, and one that is revealing and sometimes challenging. Now he has done so once again with The Pope, a beguiling tale of ecclesiastical plotting and intrigue that resembles a sort of bloodless Borgias. It may be a book about how two men reached the holiest pinnacle of the Roman Catholic Church, but when the clouds of incense clear we are left with an awful lot of sinning. The papacy is supposed to be infallible, but thanks to McCarten's deft lifting of the Vatican's scarlet curtains what we see is the breeding ground for one of the greatest scandals of our times in which conspiracy and vanity are on display to a terrifying extent (Sonia Purnell)

On 28 February 2013, a 600-year-old tradition was shattered: the conservative Pope Benedict XVI made a startling announcement. He would resign. Reeling from the news, the College of Cardinals rushed to Rome to congregate in the Sistine Chapel to pick his successor. Their unlikely choice? Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,200 years, a one time tango club bouncer, a passionate football fan, a man with the common touch.

From the prize-winning screenwriter of The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour, The Pope is a fascinating, revealing and often funny tale of two very different men whose destinies converge with each other - they both live in the Vatican - and the wider world.

How did these two men become two of the most powerful people on Earth?
What's it like to be the Pope?
What does the future hold for the Catholic Church and its 1 billion followers?

The Pope is a dual biography that masterfully combines these two popes' lives into one gripping narrative. From Benedict and Francis' experiences of war in their homelands - when they were still Joseph and Jorge - and the sexual abuse scandal that continues to rock the Church to its foundations, to the intrigue and the occasional comedy of life in the Vatican, The Pope glitters with the darker and the lighter details of life inside one of the world's most opaque but significant institutions.