Grace in Penal Times is a historical novel about the persecution of Irish Catholics and clergy as a result of the Penal Laws enacted by the English-controlled Irish Parliament in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Catholic worship was forbidden, the priests were either deported or killed, and the Irish language was banned.
This is the story of a Catholic bishop who secretly returned to Ireland in the early eighteenth century to minister to the Irish-speaking parishioners in his Diocese of Raphoe in Co. Donegal. He was continually on the run to avoid being hanged by the English authorities as he performed his pastoral duties.