The Feast of Lupercal

The Feast of Lupercal is a novel by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore. It was first published in the United States in 1957, by Boston publisher Little Brown and in the United Kingdom in 1958 by London publisher Andre Deutsch. In 1969 a paperback edition was published by Panther Books with the title A Moment of Love.

Set in Belfast in the 1950s, the novel tells the story of a 37-year-old Catholic male teacher who is single and sexually inexperienced. When he overhears a colleague refer to him as “that old woman”, he understands that his life is slipping away from him. He meets and is attracted to a Protestant girl 17 years younger than him, who is on the rebound from an affair with a married man.

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