Now and at the Hour of Our Death

A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife. In her poignant and genre-busting debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us with our own mortality and inspires us to think about what is important.

Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to Trás-os-Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abandoned by the young. Crossing great distances where eagles circle over the roads, she visits villages where rural ways of life are disappearing. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own meditations.
Brilliantly blending the immediacy of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage, Moreira Marques’ book speaks about death in a fresh way.

‘This year I was internally rearranged by “Now and at the Hour of Our Death,” a piece of lyric reportage by a Portuguese journalist, Susana Moreira Marques. It’s an account of hospice care in a rural region of Portugal, but it’s also a long poem built of morphine and gauze and ragged breathing and roadside crosses. Its glimpses splintered into me and have not left.’ — Leslie Jamison, New York Times

‘Raymond Carver once wrote about loving everything that increases me. This book increased me. It is fearless and luminous and full of grace; it travels to the edge of death and finds life there. Its attention to the particulars of love—between the ones who will go and the ones they will leave—is something close to sublime.’ — Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

‘A tender, lyrical and intimate meditation on death and bereavement, examining dispossession, the fury of grief and the end we all will face.  Now and at the Hour of our Death is written with great compassion, and with the economy and precision usually reserved for poetry.’ — Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being