Now and in the Hour of Our Death
A Novel of the Irish Troubles
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Patrick Taylor's Now and in the Hour of Our Death is a moving and compelling portrait of ordinary men and women caught up in a conflict not of their making, and of the way the past holds onto us even as we try to move on into an uncertain future.
Nine years ago, the bloody conflict in Northern Ireland tore apart two young lovers, consuming their hopes and dreams and changing their lives forever. Now, in 1983, Davy McCutcheon and Fiona Kavanagh find themselves worlds apart.
Davy, once a bomb-maker for the Provisional IRA, is serving a twenty-five-year sentence in a British prison. Having seen enough of death and violence, he wants nothing more to do with the struggle that cost him his freedom and his love. But old loyalties die hard and, despite himself, Davy is drawn into a dangerous conspiracy on behalf of his fellow Provos . . . .
Meanwhile, Fiona has forged a new life for herself in Vancouver, British Columbia, far away from the war-torn streets of Belfast. Now a vice-principal at a local elementary school, she has a successful career, good friends, and a new man in her life. Yet she remains haunted by painful memories of her troubled homeland—and the love she left behind.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Irish Troubles of the 1970s and '80s provide the background for Taylor's suspenseful sequel to 2013's Pray for Us Sinners. In 1983, Davy McCutcheon has served nine years of a 40-year sentence for arms possession and the murder of a British soldier during a raid on a Northern Ireland farmhouse where IRA soldiers were hiding a raid that thwarted a plot to assassinate the British prime minister. Davy still dreams of his former lover, Fiona Kavanagh, who has built a new life for herself in Vancouver, British Columbia. Davy's closest friend, Jimmy Ferguson, who has also settled in Vancouver, takes Fiona's photo during a chance meeting and sends it to Davy. On seeing the photo, Davy decides to participate in an IRA-led prison break and to participate in one last attack against the British before escaping, with IRA consent, to Vancouver. The moral ambiguities of the Irish conflict add to the novel's complexity.