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, Diarmuid Devine, who is single and sexually inexperienced.

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.

The poet Patrick Hicks argues that in writing the novel Moore "interrogated the educational system that taught him a version of masculinity that he found unacceptable" and that this enabled him "to become, arguably, one of the first contemporary male novelists with an overtly feminist agenda".

The novel is an unmitigated condemnation of the kind of Catholicism that denies the freedom of the individual.