Since its inception as a semi-autonomous country within the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland has survived the convulsions of the Civil War, the privations of the Second World War, the abortive IRA campaign of violence in the 1950s, and the student-led agitation for civil rights in the 1960s that led to over thirty years of brutal terror, euphemistically referred to as The Troubles. Nora Carrick lives through those turbulent times with demons of her own: the loss of a lover; one failed marriage, another barely survivng; a contentious, divided, dysfunctional family; and most demonic of all a debilitating, life-threatening epilepsy. Nora fights all of these demons with that stoic independence of spirit inherited from her MacLir family ancestry.