Now and in the Hour of Our Death
Irish Troubles • Book 2
by Patrick Taylor
Why You'll Love This
Two people destroyed by the same war, on opposite sides of the world, still reaching for each other — nine years later and the damage isn't done.
- Great if you want: love story tangled inside IRA politics and prison survival
- The experience: emotionally heavy and slow-burn — atmosphere builds steadily, not quickly
- The writing: Taylor balances political grit with quiet domestic tenderness across split storylines
- Skip if: you want action-first pacing over character interiority
About This Book
Set against the fractured landscape of 1983 Northern Ireland and the quieter streets of Vancouver, this novel asks what becomes of people after history has used them up. Davy McCutcheon is a man trying to shed a violent past while a British prison makes sure he can't forget it. Fiona Kavanagh has rebuilt herself an ocean away, but the distance between a new life and an old wound is never quite as wide as it looks. Patrick Taylor keeps these two lives in parallel tension, and what drives the pages isn't plot mechanics but something harder to shake — the question of whether people broken by ideology and circumstance can ever fully return to themselves.
Taylor writes with the patience of someone who respects his characters too much to rush them. The prose is unhurried but never slack, carrying the weight of Irish history without turning it into a lecture. Where lesser novels might lean on The Troubles as atmosphere alone, Taylor makes the politics personal — embedded in choices, silences, and loyalties that cost something real. Readers who give themselves over to this book will find it lingers the way guilt and longing do, quietly and at inconvenient moments.